Reinventing The Wheel? (To Run Myself Over)

I have been working on a templating system for quite some time now. It's one of the reasons I have not been posting. Shame on me for that, by the way. Anyway, there are probably people who are reading this and now wonder what a templating system is. Well, it's definition can differ slightly, but in this case it's a system that separates the layout from the programming logic completely.

Take for example the syntax of my templating system... anything normally typed is html and is not touched by the engine at all (okey, it's touched, but left in tact completely). Anything between <: :="" and=""> is handled by the templating system, however. Any value between the two script-delimiters (that's what they are called) will be printed to the output. So if the programming logic of a page gives the page access to a 'username' I can write "Hello <:username:>" to have it say hello Jasper to me and fill it with another name.
Besides printing values the scripts can be used to call functions, I planned two functions so far, include("page.html") and nameForCounter(varName), which can execute certain tasks. Include will insert a certain file in that location, and nameForCounter will assign a variable name to the counter of the topmost for or foreach loop (which I will explain more on later), giving you a handle to refer to it in the rest of your template.
The third thing a script can do is define a control structure. Planned of these are if, else, (possibly elseif as well), for, foreach and end ... . These work on script and plain text alike, if (statement) only considers the following content if statement is true, otherwise it will simply ignore it. An if anything that occurs before the next end if or else. Likewise else only considers the content if the last if evaluated to false - and it also ends at end if. for (value1 ++>/--> value2) will repeat the content enclosed by it and end for - starting at value1, increasing (++>) or decreasing (-->) it until value2 is reached. foreach (variableName in array). Array should be one of these variables supplied by the programming logic, but it has to be an array (surprise, surprise) then we will repeat the content (ended by end foreach, you guessed it) for each element the array has, the element always being accessible through variableName.
Multiple actions can be done in one script, in such a case they must be seperated by semicolons (;).
There is another kind of delimiter the engine recognises, <:- -:="" and="">. Anything between those two is regarded as a comment and will be removed from the document. Comments can be inside and outside script tags.


So that's what my engine is supposed to do - what does it have to do with reinventing the wheel?
(warning: technical terms - unexplained - ahead)

Now, while my syntax is different, there are other templating systems around already. None of them what I wanted though, simply take your template at real time and turn it in the website you want the users to see. I discovered this is for a reason, when making my own system. Because this costs way too much time and thus is very processor intensive. So what's the alternative? I looked into the source of the most notable templating engines, Smarty (it's open source as well, really). It simply compiles the userfriendly template to a (normally) unseen php script, which runs a lot faster, the first time a page is requested since it has been modified. I decided I would have to use a similar system to come closest to my wishes. Also I learned the trick of looking at the last time modified attribute of a file to see if it needs to be recompiled. However, when looking through Smarty's source code, it made me wonder what this new choices leave as reasons to actually make my own templating system.

It took me a while to figure out if I wanted to continue development of my engine, but I decided I would. Firstly, this script is mine, so other people may use it, but I can tweak it to my needs and make it the way I want to behave. Secondly, the syntax of my system is "better" (read as: I like it more). Thirdly, I will provide some functionality that Smarty does not provide. For now, this functionality would be: reading templates from a database and writing compiled files to a database. So yes, I will make my own system, and yes I have my reasons for it. Just drop me a line if you would be interested in using my system as well.



Now, for anyone wondering about the title, try googling that phrase. Say you would not find anything (which I cannot believe, but anyway) try finding the unrelated label for this post and look in that area.