The main claim to fame of
JSP is that it allows the separation of content presentation from programming logic.
PHP is a great programming language but as the
maintenance cycle runs it course a PHP application can become an unwieldy unintelligible mess of
HTML intermixed with PHP logic.
Smarty is a
PHP class that addresses this problem by the use of
templates. A Smarty template is a programming abstraction that allows the PHP developer to isolate logic from content. Smarty also
pre-compiles it's templets so that
real time parsing by the
PHP interpreter is not bogged down with
template assembly.