you present the subject with great simplicity
we used to study them in deep which creates lots of confusion .. seeing the big picture from outside helped me getting a clear vision

What is the relation between SDLC (System Development Life Cycle) and SSADM (Structured System Analysis and Design). Is these two terms are different or separate of each other or same or one of these two is a component of another.
Prototyping and RAD should be listed with SDLC or SSADM or with both of these ?

I am totally confused. Plz help me.

Yes, that’s how it works, you need to update the modification time of the dependency files every time you make changes to the underlying data (in PHP you can use the built-in touch() function).

About your question “how to make Smarty knows which cached files in the pool needs to be refreshed when particular underlying data changed?”, the first thing crosses my mind is to implement a kind of naming conventions technique in how you make the dependency files. Say, you have a certain template that dependent to rows of data who have, say, “Japan” as the value of its country column. Then you might want to name the dependency files for that template something like “dep_file_japan.dep”, another_dep_file_japan.dep”, etc. Using a simple Regex checking, you could easily touch() all the dependency files related to that specific data and template.

As an alternative you can also use a kind of configuration settings (using database or just configuration files) in order to “map” template files to its underlying data. But this could unnecessarily complicate things as your data grows.

I hope I’ve made myself clear with that explanation there. If you have a better solution I’d be glad if you like to share it here.