README


tepal is a Template Parsing Library, written in C. 

It's origin lies in my unhappieness with PHP, JSP and other
languages designed for web-development. Lately i learned a little
about template system and worked a little with smarty and after a
while i got the idea that if one wants to seperate program logic
from display logic it is also possible to write you application
in C as i prefer. The FastCGI interface is as fast or even faster than
the PHP interface. The only thing needed is a library that does the
same things as smarty, set template variables, parse a template and
write the result.

Well, it turns out that this only thing was more work than i first
thought, especially because i never wrote an interpreter or compiler
before. And i had not college courses on that issue too. So i had to
find out everything by my own. Thanks go to the excellent documentation
of flex and bison and the Telos GmbH that published a simple interpreter.

While i was writing this I recognised that it might be usefull at other
things too. Everything that can be created by a cleartext template
and some application logic can be created with this lib.