[Web-SIG] Re: Just lost another one to Rails

[Ryan Tomayko]

On Apr 15, 2005, at 2:49 PM, Ian Bicking wrote:
> Greg Wilson wrote:
>>  > Paul Boddie wrote:
>>> ...I firmly believe in "unbundling" templating languages from 
>>> frameworks.
>> But doesn't that just make more work for the poor sods who are trying 
>> to build things?  After all, they have to rebundle them, don't they?
>
> I don't think it's too bad.  I'm happy with how ZPTKit works, even 
> though ZPT isn't written (at all) with Webware in mind, or vice versa. 
> OTOH, I don't think ZPT with Webware provides a very good experience 
> without the non-trivial amount of glue code in ZPTKit, and that glue 
> is kind of a NxM problem (# of template languages time # of 
> frameworks). But it's not at the top of my list of problems.
>
> Other templating languages, like Webware's PSP (which is JSP-like) are 
> harder to generalize like this, because they are more closely tied to 
> the underlying code (servlets in PSP's case).  But, maybe ironically, 
> I find an entirely separate templating language easier to work with.

We're experiencing this problem with Kid, which is framework neutral. 
I'm finding that the amount of glue code needed for most frameworks is 
more than I expected.

The other issue I'm having with is that it's really hard to provide 
anything but really simple template examples and other documentation 
without assuming a certain framework. I can show the basic layout 
control and substitution features but it's hard to show real world 
examples of, say, how a basic site should be laid out.

Framework specific idioms bleed into the template. I guess this isn't 
always bad but it makes it hard to talk about templating without 
declaring a certain framework beforehand.

I'd personally love to see a common set of request/response/session 
objects (a la Paul's webstack) be adopted. I'm beginning to think that 
separating templates from frameworks can only work well if the glue in 
between is somewhat standardized. I've never quite understood why 
everyone wants to maintain these objects themselves anyway. I've looked 
at Quixote's, CherryPy's, and Webware's implementations of the basic 
request/response/session objects and I just don't see a whole lot of 
variance.

I'm not looking for templates to be completely portable or anything, I 
just wish we could talk about and document them without a chapter about 
what environment it's running under.

Ryan