php. For a detailed reference, we recommend Smarty PHP Template Programming
and Applications (Hasin Hayder, J. P. Maia, and Lucian Gheorghe. Packt Publishing, 2006.).
?– Note Adding Smarty or another templating engine to a web application??™s architecture adds some initial
coding effort and also implies a learning curve. However, you should try it anyway, because the advantages
of using such a modern development technique will prove to be significant later in the process.
What About the Alternatives?
Smarty is not the only template engine available for PHP. You can find many others by Googling
for ???PHP template engines.??? You can find the most popular of them nicely listed by Justin
Silverton in his article ???Top 25 PHP Template Engines??? (your favorite search engine will help
you, once again, find the article).
Although all template engines follow the same basic principles, we chose to use Smarty in
the PHP e-commerce project for this book because of its very good performance results, powerful
features (such as template compilation and caching), and wide acceptance in the industry.
CHAPTER 2 ?– LAYING OUT THE FOUNDATIONS 22
Using MySQL to Store Web Site Data
Most of the data your visitors will see while browsing the web site will be retrieved from a relational
database. A relational database management system (RDBMS) is a complex software
program, the purpose of which is to store, manage, and retrieve data as quickly and reliably as
possible.
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