Smarty

Smarty is a popular templating engine for [[PHP]], designed to facilitate the separation of application logic and content from its presentation. This separation is beneficial in web development, where it helps make the code more manageable, maintainable, and flexible.

Smarty is used as a template system for PHP, allowing the creation of [[HTML]] templates which contain simple placeholders for data that is populated dynamically. These templates are separate from the PHP scripts, which handle the application's logic.

Smarty has its own syntax for embedding dynamic content in templates. It uses curly braces {} to denote its tags, which are then filled with data by the PHP script.

Example: Hello, {$name}! - where {$name} is a placeholder for a variable that will be assigned by the PHP script.

By separating the PHP code (logic) from the HTML (presentation), Smarty promotes a clean architecture, making applications easier to develop and maintain. Smarty includes a robust caching mechanism to improve the performance of web applications. It can cache the rendered templates to reduce the time spent on generating pages from the templates on subsequent requests.

Developers can extend Smarty with custom functions, modifiers, and plug-ins. This flexibility allows for further customization to meet specific needs of a project. Smarty is widely used in PHP-based web applications. It's particularly beneficial in large applications where separation of design and code is crucial.

Smarty is designed to be compatible with a variety of PHP versions and setups, making it a versatile choice for many developers. Smarty offers some security features, such as automatic escaping of variables, to help prevent security issues like [[Cross-Site Scripting]] (XSS).