Developer Blog

Templating Systems are extremely important in web development. They allow us to manage our designs to make them more usable for the user, and more efficient for developers and designers to work with.

Recent developments such as Jaxer (AJAX Server) will allow us to take this to the next evolutionary step. Refer to my previous post Jaxer, the silver bullet for more information on Jaxer and Templating.

I have published a “report” that I have been working on the past few weeks, that details and provides examples of the evolutionary steps of templating systems.

Here are the levels that are included in the report:
Level 0 - Static
Level 1 - Includes
Level 1 - Conditional
Level 2 - Shortcuts
Level 3 - Population
Level 4.0 - Separation
Level 4.1 - Separation (Defaults)
Level 4.2 - Separation (Mixture)
Level 5 - Dedicated Solutions (Templating Engine)
Level 6 - Client Side Templating (Not Fully Functional)
Level 7 - Dual Side Templating (Separate Installations) (Not Fully Functional)
Level 8 - Dual Side Templating (Single Installation) (Not Fully Functional)

Templating Engines Used:
Smarty and JSmarty.

To view and download the report visit here:
http://www.balupton.com/sandbox/templates/

Thanks.

Note (16/02/2008):
Unfortunately, JSmarty is still not in a position to be usable, hence the “Not Fully Functional” notices. Hopefully this project will gain more attention and reach that stage. But for the purpose of showing a concept, it still works well.

Update (17/02/2008):
I decided to make my own javascript smarty template engine, you can check it out it’s progress here:
Balupton’s jQuery Smarty Plugin

Lightboxes are a way to display a image on the same page elegantly.

Features:

• Lightboxes can be grouped together.
• Titles and descriptions for images.
• Automatic url detection and inclusion of required files, so no configuration is needed.
  * So all you need to do is include it’s single .js file and you are good to go.
• Greedy elements (flash, object, select) are hidden away and re-shown appropriatly.
• New / Optimized design.
• Proper jQuery Plugin.
• Provides many easy automatic and manual ways of creating and starting lightboxes.
• Only 15KB in size! (Includes all js, css and image files).

Take a look at the demo site http://www.balupton.com/sandbox/jquery_lightbox/ to see it in action, as well as examples of it’s usage.

Based upon Lokesh Dhakar’s Lightbox 2: http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/

Grab it here.