Smarty 3 alpha released

It turns out that the third day, that is, on October 17 of this year, the alpha release was released by many of the beloved (and by many despised) Smarty template engine.



The interface of the template engine has not changed much. These are all the same display() , fetch() and assign() , which cover 99 percent of all needs. Monstrune assign_by_ref() rested in the Bose. There he and the road;)



The insides have undergone more significant changes:

• Refusal of PHP4 support and full use of PHP5 object-oriented features. That is, patterns can be used dereferencing objects without crutches;
• The object-oriented approach has also affected plugins: now every plugin is a class inherited from Smarty_Internal_PluginBase
• The main class file - Smarty.class.php - became suspiciously small: only 11 kb, including the hefty LGPL license spoilers;)
• All required elements excluded from the kernel are loaded only as needed (lazy loading)
• Little pleasure - built-in implementation of the singleton pattern.
• Support for native PHP templates is a feature that will most likely generate multiple holivars. It will be interesting to see what happens, but from myself I can say that I will not use this feature)

')

I must say that in comparison with the 2.x branch, the distribution kit has become significantly stouter: the libs folder exported from SVN took a little less than 800 kb, while in version 2.6.20 its weight was about 320 kb.



The lack of unit tests is also alarming (in version 2.6.20 they were, albeit a damn suspicious quality). But it will be interesting to look at it. Perhaps you will need to do :)



Details about the release - in the official README .



Those interested can pull version of SVN:

svn checkout smarty-php.googlecode.com/svn/branches/Smarty3Alpha