[Catalog-sig] Tal to Django/Jinja transition

[Benji York]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 11:10 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 5:59 PM, Fred Drake <fdrake at acm.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 2:57 PM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Here comes the second question. Considering that I have an idea how to
>>> do this in Django and:
>>> 1. more users are familiar with Django templates than with TAL
>>> 2. people are unlikely to learn another language for PyPI
>>> 3. Django templates are used in AppEngine port
>>> 4. Django templates seems way more simple and no less powerful
>>
>> Some may consider me biased with respect to ZPT, but I think I can be
>> reasonable.
>>
>> Having recently looked at Django templating language (via Jinja2), I found
>> the language to be more confusing.  I'm not generally a fan of template
>> languages (though I concede that they're useful, and use ZPT regularly),
>> the set of assumptions that seem present in the Django language revives my
>> wariness and mistrust of templating.
>
> We are all technical people here. I learned Django templating, because
> I have to patch Rietveld. I tried to learn TAL to patch Roundup, but
> couldn't find a sane reference, so I learned by example, but still
> can't find a way how to patch PyPI for my simple use case. Django docs
> are much better in this respect.

When I have questions I use the TAL, TALES, and METAL specs:
http://wiki.zope.org/ZPT/TALSpecification14
http://wiki.zope.org/ZPT/TALESSpecification13
http://wiki.zope.org/ZPT/METALSpecification11

> So, as we are all technical people here, do you have any specific
> critics towards one approach or another, so I can at least get an idea
> why people like TAL and may prefer it over Django given equal
> familiarity and experience in both languages?

I've never used the Django template language so my perspective is
limited.  I like ZPT (Zope Page Templates, the combination of TAL,
TALES, and METAL) because it is simple and well defined.

I'd actually like it if it did even less (e.g., not have the ability to
include Python expressions).  I suspect I'm in the minority there.
-- 
Benji York