Views as classes

views_as_classes.md

Views as classes, proposal by @roxblnfk

Idea is to have view templates as classes, not as separate template files. It could be additional to commonly used pattern.

Benefits

• A class can be a generator that may be helpful for HTTP chunked responses with huge pages.
• Each view class can require its own dependencies.
  • No need to inject anything globally via config.
  • No need to have vardoc at the beginning of each file.
• Each class can hold data and metadata.

Drawbacks

• Syntax isn't good (need to verifiy that).
• Business logic in such class-views isn't as obvious evil as in view templates. People may get confused.
• Not sure how to deal with themes.
• Not sure how to deal with view translations.

Possible implementation

Introduce TemplateInterface with default implementation that uses template files:

$template = (new Template('filename', [data => data]));
$view->render($template);

Then there will be a way to implement another template transparently.

Addititional benefit:

• better navigation to the rendering template

Possible implementation

$view->render(Template::class, ['data' => $data]);

// render() fuction:
// if ($template instanceof TemplateInterface) {
//     $injector->make($template)->invoke('render', ...)
// } else {
//     // classic view
// }