norman.walsh.name: Comments on /2006/02/23/nwalshOnRailshttp://norman.walsh.name/2006/02/23/nwalshOnRails/comments.atom2012-02-13T07:49:27.081602ZComment 1 on /2006/02/23/nwalshOnRailshttp://norman.walsh.name/2010/09/25/oauth#comment00012006-02-24T07:44:11Z2006-02-24T07:44:11ZIan Phillipsda39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709

Have a look at the Kid templating system, http://kid.lesscode.org, it's the default with TurboGears and can optionally be used with Django (both python based frameworks).

I like the fact that it keeps code out of templates almost completely (there's an optional syntax to include code snippets, but I've personally never used it while evaluating the two named frameworks).

/Ian.

Comment 2 on /2006/02/23/nwalshOnRailshttp://norman.walsh.name/2010/09/25/oauth#comment00022006-02-24T15:29:38Z2006-02-24T15:29:38ZAvdida39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709

I'm allergic to .rhtml as well (not least because it's a bit of a pain to get Emacs to be happy with it, and anything that hurts Emacs hurts me). Fortunately, Rails supports pluggable templating systems. XML::Builder is included as an alternative by default, and there's always Amrita if you want to do clean XHTML templates.

Comment 3 on /2006/02/23/nwalshOnRailshttp://norman.walsh.name/2010/09/25/oauth#comment00032006-03-03T00:44:38Z2006-03-03T00:44:38ZMIchael(tm) Smithda39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709

At work I've built a lot of PHP-based apps in the past, mostly for doing SQL queries into our internal bug-tracking and release-tracking databases, and building reports that combine the data that comes back. Basicallly a class of apps for which Rails seems like it would be a very good fit. So I've been interested in building a real app using Rails, but haven't yet identified a new problem in need of an new application. I guess I could try rewriting one of my existing PHP apps in Rails, would that I had time.

Anyway, I have done a bit of playing around with it, enough that it's had the nice side effect of making me learn a little Ruby. Which I'm very glad I did because it's made me realize how good Ruby itself is (outside of Rails) is a general language for writing utilities -- a class of apps that I've mostly used Perl for in the past, and some Python. It seems to have a lot of "hey, that's a really elegant approach" features -- like the "routing" feature you mention in this blog entry.

The first such utility that I built using Ruby was an XML-RPC client that builds an XML-RPC request, takes the XML-RPC response data and constructs a simple(r) XML document from it, then applies an XSLT stylesheet to that to convert it to HTML. It was an extremely simple app, but it was surprising to me how quick and easy it was to code it up in Ruby. Without knowing any Ruby at all initialy, after just a hour or two at most (and after slapping a CGI interface on the utility), I had a Ruby-based web app for querying my XML-RPC service and returning HTML-formatted results from it.

Anyway, Rails or no, I've definitely found a new friend in Ruby and I reckon I'll be using it a lot more going forward for doing quick development of other such utilities.