Smarty 3 alpha released

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

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

interiors have undergone more significant changes:

• The abandonment of support for PHP4 and the full use of object-oriented features of PHP5. That is, in the templates you can use dereferencing objects without crutches;
• The object-oriented approach also affected plugins: now each 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 spoilers of the LGPL license;)
• All required elements excluded from the kernel are loaded only as needed (lazy loading)
• A little nice thing is the built-in implementation of the singleton pattern.
• Support for native PHP templates is a feature that will surely spawn many holivars. It will be interesting to see what happens, but I can say for myself that I will not use this feature)

I must say that compared to the 2.x branch, the distribution has grown significantly thicker: the folder libsexported from SVN took a little less than 800 kb, while in version 2.6.20 its weight was about 320 kb.

The absence of unit tests is also alarming (in version 2.6.20 they were, albeit damn suspicious quality). But look at the case will be interesting. Perhaps it will be necessary to tackle :)

Details about the release - in the official README .

Those interested can pull the version from SVN:

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