Sort of linked to my last entry, the guys over at Smarty have stirred something up of a hornet’s nest with their trademarking of the “Smarty” name. As an open source project its fine for them to do so, but of course we free loading lovers don’t like the thought. More relevantly the developer of Smarty-Lite was recently forced as a result to stop using the term “Smarty” in their library.

One day I’m going to find a trademark database and figure out how a common use phrase evaded trademarking before now… I could have sworn it was a registered trademark at the very least in the US and for a non-related company. One assumes the Smarty copyright holders did perform a database search.

Anyways, in one of those obscure lengthy possibly illegible blog posts (just kidding), Panama Jack got around to posting a link to the Smarty-Lite followup renamed Template-Lite that he will be developing. The Template-Lite website announces the release of version 1.0.0 since February 17th. Really someone should have blogged this earlier! Main point is it uses around half the memory of Smarty and operates faster as a result.

I haven’t tested it myself, just got curious and poked around in the code. A few items of note. It’s a put together very well, so little wonder its using less memory – most of the Smarty bloat has been excised. I did note it was missing the “assign_by_ref()” method, and escapes using htmlspecialchars() – not htmlentities(‘string’, ENT_QUOTES, ‘UTF-8′) as is best practice (charset being variable obviously).

The first is likely an easy addition – would be a good one too since I do a spot of referencing in my View layer for QSE, and developers with dangerously large arrays don’t like copying them all over the place. I don’t use Smarty’s escaping mechanism so it doesn’t bother me – template designers however will. Not entirely certain what Smarty does for escaping…

I think I’ll try this out over the next few days and figure out how much memory it actually saves me.

An aside:

Just on the Smarty trademark notices and copyrights in general. Whoever wrote that crap should buy an English dictionary and look up the the term “clarity” before touching a keyboard again. Most of the terms are vague and one talks about limiting permissions covered by Fair Use (it reads that way at least). Whole page stinks of corporate bluster. I think I see what may irk people…

What in God’s name does this mean? Have I broken copyright law by opening their homepage? Is the public banned from viewing graphical and layout elements? C’mon guys, at least hire a lawyer to write this stuff.

The rights specified above to view, download and print the documents and information available on this Site are not applicable to the graphical elements, design or layout of this Site.

Go hop, I own a printer and you let me download your pages. Bleh.

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