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ssm

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Description:
   HTMLSSM (SSM for short) is a template engine created primarily for web development. Unlike many template engines, the API has been kept simple. Although it has been tempting to add many "bells and whistles", we have decided just to release the source a let each developer customize SSM as needed. And just so you know, HTMLSSM stands for "html server side manipulator". Silly name, but we like it.
 
Versions:
   There are currently four versions of HTMLSSM: Java, Perl, ASP 3.0, COM. The API for all there are virtually identical with only a few minor differences (e.g. in Java and Perl the constructor is usefully overloaded).
 
Goal:
   SSM was written with two purposes in mind.

The first is making web development a faster process by cutting down on the amount of redundant code one needs to write in order to perform some action and output html as a result. Ex: The amount of code necessary to take some data from a database and turn that into a select box isn't enormous, but it's definitely annoying to rewrite code to do that a million times for a billion different projects etc.

The second is to separate html from programing logic. Just so you know, you should NEVER EVER mix code with html ;) It's just a bad idea... and if I find any of you writing "<%= [some variable] %>", I will be forced to hunt you down and take your keyboard away.
 
Why:
   Why should you use ssm? What magic does it do that is so worth making this fuss over? Step closer and I'll tell you. There are two BIG reasons that ssm is cool...

The first, is a single method called setField. setField takes two arguments, name and value, and alters form elements to reflect the value passed no matter what type of form element name references. It makes the semantics of obj.setField Name,Value work for EVERY TYPE of HTML field. This concept may be hard to understand with just the one statement, so I suggest you read through the tutorial for further explanation. Needless to say however, that's one powerful method ;)

The second major benefit of htmlssm is the subtemplate concept. With subtemplates you can very easily build tables, forms, or entire pages with very few lines of code.
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