[Zope3-dev] Re: [SpringCleaning07]

[Martijn Faassen]

Rocky Burt wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-20-12 at 12:52 +0100, Martijn Faassen wrote:
>> http://genshi.edgewall.org
>>
>> Inspired by Kid (in turn among others inspired by ZPT), the main 
>> template language of TurboGears, written by the people who also created 
>> Trac, and it seems to be getting traction. TurboGears among others is 
>> going to adopt it, but also things like the creator of SQLAlchemy (and 
>> Myghthy) spending time optimizing it, etc. It's close enough to ZPT to 
>> be palatable to me, and has some nice features for reuse.
>>
>> If we're going to get out of the server business we could also consider 
>> getting out of the template language business. :)
> 
> To be quite frank, the templating language doesn't really mean a whole
> lot to me.  I could use just about anything. 

Even if it's slow, doesn't offer reuse functionality and is supported by 
just me, say? :)

It matters to me especially when we're talking about reuse. Template 
languages differ significantly in their approach. I also prefer to pick 
something that has a certain momentum and a certain performance.

As a side topic, I'm also slowly coming to the conclusion that tales 
path expressions are a waste of time and effort. We spent a lot of time 
making sure that we can express something as a path expression, and a 
Python expression would be just as easy to read and explain. We're not 
stopping people from writing more complicated python expressions anyway, 
and there are real cases where they're needed. A very different 
templating mechanism where there is no Python at all and data is always 
pregenerated before rendering is still attractive for other reasons, but 
in the ZPT case I've become less and less convinced it's worth the hassle.

The nice thing then about something like Genshi is that instead of:

python:foo.bar

I can simply write:

foo.bar

Python expressions in TAL are cumbersome in part because they're simply 
hard to type, not because they're necessarily *complicated*.

> I would certainly support
> having Zope getting out of the template language business.  But I think
> it would be import for Zope to include a default templating language (if
> that's kid, genshi, whatever).

Hm, with 'getting out of the web server business' I at least always 
meant that we should still offer a default web server. We should also 
offer a default templating language. We should just not have to maintain 
that web server or templating language ourselves anymore. "Getting out 
of the X business" doesn't mean we don't evaluate and choose X. It just 
means we stop maintaining and developing X all by ourselves.

Regards,

Martijn