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Comment by hackernewz | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like really bad coding taken to another level. At some point in your program you will know which thumbnails are needed for the page. Instead of structuring that logic and commenting it well, perhaps even turning it into a sub-system or library, you pepper the templates with database calls. And then, you waste more CPU time by scanning the full HTML output of a page multiple times.

This is like AJAX all on the server side. All the hassle of async processing with none of the benefits.

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I think you misunderstood the article, the point of that technique is to greatly reduce the amount of database calls. We don't "pepper the templates with database calls", to the contrary, we avoid doing them on the spot like a bad implementation would. We treat the data needs for these objects all at once, as late as possible (so we can group the data fetching needs of as many objects as possible), greatly reducing the amount of DB calls needed.

We don't scan the HMTL either, this system doesn't have templates, this is another point of the technique. The data structure holding the output contains both DOM and objects precisely to avoid a templating syntax, which would be costly to scan.

The tree that contains intertwined objects and DOM is only traversed once, when it's echoed. The data resolution is done in passes, but doesn't require traversing the "output" tree.

Ok, so you're not writing "mysql_query()" in the middle of your templates, but you are letting them decide what data they need. Your view layer is pulling data down from the model layer. And the whole DOM-Object "intertwining" thing would worry me: how do you test it, for a start.

Only some of the data, when it makes sense to use that technique. Most of the data fetching on our pages is still done the old-fashioned MVC way. You can keep the best of both worlds by carefully selecting which parts you decide to defer. The technique is most interesting in situations where the relationship between controllers and views is complex and "bubbling" a new need for data inside a view's logic back to its controller is difficult. It makes even more sense to use when you identify similar needs in views/controllers pairs that are far in scope from each other. Like the AJAX example I gave, you can group DB queries across completely separate AJAX requests that have nothing to do with each other.

The intertwining part is quite straightforward to sanity check and unit test. For its output buffering aspect, PHP provides a way to check that you closed as many levels of buffering as you opened. As for object resolution, you can detect easily when things go wrong like attempting to render objects whose data hasn't been fetched by the resolution passes. It's difficult for me to prove "how safe" that part of the technique is without going into a lot of details about our implementation. That tool is so low-level for us that it's one of the most tested, error-checking areas of our code. When debugging you can also visualize the tree of intertwined DOM and objects at any stage of construction or resolution.

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