[Flow] TemplateBuilder (a developer's perspective)

[Jacob Floyd]

I've been thinking alot about programmatically modifying fluid templates, fluidifying html templates, and template building in general. One of my goals is to make this feel like it fits with Flow and Fluid. Fluid is such a clean templating language, so I don't want to tarnish it with an ugly API in the TemplateBuilder. Besides, ugly = code smell = hard to maintain = no one wants to maintain, add features, or touch it for fear of breaking it.

Essentially, I want to embed QueryPath[1] within a BlobQuery (which is basically just FlowQuery + a selection of files to work with). That brings the power and the API of jQuery to the TemplateBuilder.

(straight QueryPath doesn't work for the TemplateBuilder, because it will need to work from within an Eel context as well, thus I am embedding QueryPath in FlowQuery)

I'm not sure on the naming of a few Fluid-specific FlowQueryOperations (read: methods in the API), but I want some feedback on the API. In the doc at [2] I have documented some use cases with a PHP snippet that shows how someone might accomplish that from within PHP. Please tear it apart and tell me what you like and don't like. How would you like to see building Templates from within PHP?

[1] QueryPath.org
[2] http://bit.ly/15BRD00

Cheers,
Jacob Floyd
The Fluid Template Builder Google Summer of Code Project Guy