Following in the heels of his first post looking at a few of the templating offerings available to PHP applications, Gonzalo Ayuso is back with part two - a comparison versus just "plain PHP".

In my last post I created a small (and very personal) test of different templating engines in PHP (Smarty, Haanga and Twiw). Someone posted a comment asking for the comparison between those template engines and old school phtml. OK I’ve done some tests. It’s a bit difficult to create the template inheritance (without cloning one of the template engines and creating a new one) so I have one approximation with a simple include. It’s not the same but it’s similar.

He tries to recreate a similar scenario as in the three other templating tools by setting up a base template (with inline PHP), a class to populate the contents of it and a sample template with "inheritance". He stacks up the execution times and memory usage against the results from the other three with interesting results, specifically compared to Haanga.