APM: Looking for a good HTML templating system

[Bob Apthorpe]

Hi,

It's been a while since I've done any CGI programming in perl but
recently I took on a project where we're using HTML::Template to render
pages. My preference is to use a templating system to separate the logic
from the presentation and most recently I've been using PHP and the
Smarty template system for web application development. Smarty has its
quirks but it's easy enough to pass complex data structures into a
template to generate rather elaborate pages.

Not having any previous experience with HTML::Template aside from
perldoc and some trivial examples, how do the two tools compare? Is
there a better system to use that does not require mod_perl? I'm
specifically eliminating HTML::Mason because it's too heavyweight for
what I'm trying to do, i.e. I'm looking more for a templating system
than an application framework (I'm still learning Rails...)

The application is not expected to be high traffic so it can run as a
CGI without worrying much about performance. Conversely, this is for a
client and I would rather not have to specify a highly-tuned ("hacked")
Apache configuration, which is why I don't want to mess with mod_perl.

Google turns up
http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/tmpl/comparison/comparison.html
and after reading that, I think Template Toolkit bears some
investigation. Still, I'd appreciate hearing people's experiences with
perl templating systems.

Thanks,

-- Bob