Abstract
Porous polymeric materials offer a great versatility in most of the promising fields of applications. This article affords a critically selected overview of the recent synthetic strategies developed to design porous polymers and their potential applications in emerging areas of science and technology, such as analytical techniques, supported catalysis, controlled drug delivery, and so on. A large variety of macromolecular architectures can be employed in different template approaches: molecularly imprinted polymers, supramolecular assemblies, block copolymers, and polymer blends based on hyperbranched polymers are important precursors as specific template-oriented architectures for the creation of original porous polymers. Interpenetrating Polymer Networks represent a unique class of materials that have also been put forward for this purpose.