Andy Wardley's - Perl Template Toolkit ==>
I've been using the Perl Template Toolkit to process text files in my day job for some years. And now that I have decided to go public I am using it for these pages on my web site. It's a veritable software Swiss Army Knife and it is so useful because it was so well conceived by it's primary author, Andy Wardley (IMHO). Well done Andy and those who helped him. Solid work.
What is the Perl Template Toolkit?
To quote the author's own site ...
"the Template Toolkit is a fast, flexible and highly extensible template processing system. It is Free (in both senses: free beer and free speech), Open Source software and runs on virtually every modern operating system known to man. It is mature, reliable and well documented, and is used to generate content for countless web sites ranging from the very small to the very large. It is written in the Perl programming language but you don't need to know any Perl to use it. In fact, it was specifically created to allow web designers and developers to concentrate on generating web pages without getting bogged down in programming matters. We call this a "Clear Separation of Concerns" and it makes the whole processes of building, updating and maintaining a web site or web application significantly easier."
But the Template Toolkit is most certainly not just for creating web sites. I also use it to:
- create industrial process control system configurations from databases
- reverse engineer and / or modify old programs
- create complete sets of 'unique' server configuration files
Weird uses, perhaps, but very efficient on my time.
