Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever written is spaghetti(workingsoftware.com.au)

82 pointsby dools15 lat temu121 comments

workingsoftware.com.au

Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever written is spaghetti

http://www.workingsoftware.com.au/page/Your_templating_engine_sucks_and_everything_you_have_ever_written_is_spaghetti_code_yes_you

124 comments

peteforde15 lat temu

Every programmer is on a long, cyclical journey where every stepping stone feels like a new kind of enlightenment. Blogging allows them to share their brilliance with the world, showing how they are surely amongst the first to attain their new level of purity and zen.

The funny thing about this post is that the author tells us to get off our high horses and come down from our ivory towers... and then proceeds to make a series of highly conjecturable claims presented with no factual evidence beyond his own confident assertion that he's in the know. There's like, no chance that in two years he'll be advocating for his new new philosophy.

In the meantime, I'm left to wonder "Iain Dooley who?" and be glad that I'm confident enough not to read an opinion-as-fact article and assign it significant credibility.

PS: A good first editing step is to ask "does my opinion-as-fact blog post question the capacity and potential of a professional web designer to understand simple concepts like string interpolation, and could they find this insulting?" before assuming that you've got it all figured out.

shinykitten15 lat temu

I won't defend the author; my opinions here fall mostly inline with your own. But I still wonder if there isn't something deeper...

Presenting something as fact is an extremely quick way to find out if you're wrong. It's much faster than asking a question. The impulse to correct is stronger than the one to answer. So I interpret the post as the blogger's subconscious attempt at verifying and normalizing his opinions.

In this way, a blog is mostly a self development tool. I should start one of my own, I think. I never have before because I lack the hubris to think that my little discoveries are novel enough that anyone else would care. But I see now, maybe that's not the point.

dools15 lat temu

Yeah, I'd say that's a pretty fair assessment. I personally find this style of writing more interesting to read (which is why I emulate that) but I'm also not particularly experienced at writing so it's good to get feedback on what works and what doesn't for particular audiences.

I am definitely using a blog as a means of getting "outside the vacuum", though, and as you say evaluating my own opinions by putting them out in public and seeing how people react.

dools15 lat temu

Whilst this article is indeed an opinion piece and strongly hyperbolic (and perhaps even didactic), I'm not sure why that offends you. I don't have any statistics about large or small organisations putting this into practice so I'm not sure what other facts I could have included apart from the examples I provided.

The capacity of designers to understand anything isn't the subject of the post, so I'm not sure why anyone would be offended by that.

The idea is that it's easier to find someone to work on HTML/JavaScript/CSS in a static HTML context than it is to find someone familiar with whatever frameworks you're using and it's templating language, then to have that installed locally (especially when you're not working with a long term in-house team of designer/developers and don't have lots of time to spend on training people).

I also personally find it far easier and quicker to iterate and test new interface ideas quickly when working with static HTML so I like to be able to view my templates outside of the context of my application/framework etc. and then iterate without having to re-apply a bunch of templating code.

_3u1015 lat temu

It's ok to write a little polemic here or there but don't be surprised when people react negatively to it. People are offended because you are saying they are incompetent at their profession.

Have the humility to understand that many of us have been doing this for years and have seen numerous attempts to revolutionize templating, and gasp have written webapps before the idea of templating really took hold.

If you want to persuade people to take up your ideas regarding DOM manipulation in the controller, I'd suggest not starting by telling people they are writing spahgetti code. It's a great way to get page views, it's a poor way to persuade people.

People probably would have reacted much better to your argument if you started with "Hey, I'm doing things this way and here's why it works for me" instead of "You're all idiots who write spaghetti code". Embedding XSL selectors in HTML attributes which is processed by a half-assed implementation of XSL in PHP is the kind of thing I think when thinking spaghetti code.

What you don't realize is that you've invented a new templating language based on XSL but with half the features. Those of us who've been around the block a few times like to call this inner-platform effect. We've also seen this idea before when it was pitched with J2EE and used XML with an XSL templating system.

tchvil15 lat temu

I revolutionized as well the templating 3 years ago with pure.js... This one is an intentional xslt for json.

The result is a thin ~400 followers on http://github.com/pure/pure, we use it for our web app, and I get regular thanks emails. Even some copycats appeared.

Nothing changed. Server power is still wasted sending HTML to idle terminals using a markup/logic soup like we do since 1995.

A pretty useless fight, but at least I'm happy I tried.

dools15 lat temu

Hi, thanks for the tips. I'm always interested in opinions on my writing style and how to communicate better.

Regarding your critique of Fragmentify, that's actually not so much what I'm advocating here as it is just the impetus for realising that there are 2 distinct components to templating which are: 1) the re-use of common assets, and 2) the application of some "logic" to display dynamic data.

It doesn't matter what you use to fragment your markup (I personally think that using XPath to manipulate an XML document isn't particularly off the mark but whatever, to each their own). Dreamweaver allows you to edit common assets pretty easily and then export a ZIP with head-to-foot complete HTML documents in it. I'm sure there are a million other ways to skin that cat.

What I'm saying is that the separation between "display logic" and "business logic" either doesn't exist or at the very least shouldn't be occuring between the backend and the frontend.

You could, if you wanted to, put your "view rendering" code in some other place in your application, but that's tangential to my case for completely removing any and all logic from templates and working solely with (and iterating solely with) HTML/CSS/JS when building your interfaces.

fleitz15 lat temu

Personally I'd never use it because I intensely dislike the syntax of HTML and CSS and avoid it at all costs since discovering HAML/sass.

I find a text editor (vim in my case)/photoshop + haml/sass + live reload to be my most productive workflow, one screen for the text editor, one screen for the browser, when I save the browser reloads the page.

For me there are a lot of things that just work smoother by having the data populated, when I work with designers I just take whatever they give me (sometimes just a PSD) and work with it, if they need static HTML/CSS I just use wget/save as webpage to save the html and assets.

[deleted]15 lat temu

darklajid15 lat temu

Why I (note: personal opinion) think that this article was arrogantly written and not for me:

You try to make a rant (because that's what it is) more interesting by adding random fake quotes/thoughts that you attribute to the reader, i.e. me. There's exactly one person that knows my thoughts and I don't feel represented by your 'quotes' - so everything in light green on that site is bullshit according to me. Lucky for me you colored the link-bait title in the same way, so..

dools15 lat temu

Duly noted. The "strawman" argument thing I always find makes a post (particularly an opinion piece) easier or more entertaining to read (I may have read a little too much maddox in my time, though).

jamesaguilar15 lat temu

All depends on your goal. Maddox runs an entertainment website. It's not meant to convince anyone of anything or otherwise be productive. His style is in service to the purpose of the site, so it stands to reason that emulating it will have a similar impact on what your readers take away from your work.

jjddss15 lat temu

It might have went over better had you attributed the quotes to some "third party", like "Mr. ERB Exponent, December 2011". You don't risk personally offending the reader. The tradeoff is it might make the joke a little less obvious. (I might Google for "Mr. ERB Exponent", thinking it's a web persona who was notorious for expounding on ERB.)

Writing is hard.

(For what it's worth, the attributions didn't bother me.)

hetman15 lat temu

Can't believe so many people here need their fragile egos propped up. I thought the fake comments were silly and entertaining... which is a nice way to break up an opinion piece.

crikli15 lat temu

Posts like this are little snapshots of a programmer's development during which he really thinks he has this shit figured out.

dextorious15 lat temu

"""In the meantime, I'm left to wonder "Iain Dooley who?" and be glad that I'm confident enough not to read an opinion-as-fact article and assign it significant credibility."""

Yeah. And I wonder "peteforde", who? Should we only listen to what established figures have to say?

The problem with your attitude is that nowhere you access what the author wrote --you just add critique how he told it: highly conjecturable claims presented with no factual evidence, etc.

The important stuff to ask is, was it a good idea?

(Good ideas don't always come with factual evidence you know). What you think of it? What counter-example can you find.

Basically you just told us: the author is unknown, he doesn't formally prove his idea. Well, DUH!

I read tons of posts with such qualities on the inter-tubes.

That doesn't stop me of getting something out of some of them, and a few of those are pure gold.

"""PS: A good first editing step is to ask "does my opinion-as-fact blog post question the capacity and potential of a professional web designer to understand simple concepts like string interpolation, and could they find this insulting?" before assuming that you've got it all figured out."""

Yeah, as if this is the gist of the post, and the litmus test of a technical idea is if it can hurt the feelings of web designers...

simonw15 lat temu

Templating by manipulating the DOM is one of those bad ideas that just keeps on turning up. At first glance it seems like a eureka-moment flash of purity, but the practical realities of it are pretty horrible.

For any change to the page more complex than tweaking copy or maybe changing an element (a ul to an ol for example) you'll have to update both the HTML and the DOM manipulation code - killing your separation of concerns.

Even worse, you have to have a complete understanding of how what the DOM manipulation code does before you can edit any of the HTML at all - otherwise you might accidentally kill the page by changing the order of two seemingly unimportant elements, or deleting an unused div.

You'll also be forced to make all sorts of compromises in your markup to accommodate the templating layer, which will drive your front-end engineers crazy.

Finally, there are extremely useful aspects of regular template languages (like template inheritance and includes) which don't map at all neatly to a DOM manipulation engine - so you'll probably have to compromise on those and end up inventing your own weird attribute-driven template engine.

I'd suggest approaching this idea with caution. There's a reason most popular template engines are designed the way they are: practicality beats purity.

dools15 lat temu

Actually, my suggestions is just to encourage template implementation and refactoring with impugnity. There are perhaps ways of refining workflow to ensure that ids and classes are perhaps changed less than other aspects of the markup and used as hooks to "animate" the templates, but any time lost fixing broken templates as a result of an incompatible change pales in comparison to the time spent going back and forth between designers and developers to fix a problem where the scope happens to fall in between 2 skillsets (particularly when dealing with people in different timezones).

jeromeparadis15 lat temu

I've never had problems with the traditional method of the developer enhancing the designer's static HTML file to make them dynamic. further down the road, it's pretty rare presentation tweaks will break the tempting logic.

However, the biggest problem I've had with any designer is the refactoring of html ids and class that breaks AJAX or jQuery code. So the remaining problem, which is the biggest in my opinion, isn't addressed in your approach. Designers still need to be aware of jQuery/AJAX application logic to avoid breaking stuff. My approach to this problem is to use and document custom HTML properties for your jQuery/AJAX hooks. However, it doesn't solve the problem of updating part of the presentation which still relies on the markup structure.

EDIT:

But you still can rely on custom HTML properties to define updatable sections. While I find this approach better, a designer can still screw this by refactoring and omitting these custom properties.

So, relying on IDs and classes through server-side DOM manipulation further acerbates the problem. It's an approach of relying on markup on the server side instead of simply rendering. It adds an additional layer of possible breakage.

simonw15 lat temu

I remain skeptical, but I'd love to hear about a collaborative project that used this technique succesfully

dools15 lat temu

Yes I have to put my money where my mouth is. I'm thinking the best way to do this will be to take a relatively simple application and have it built entirely through outsourced labour, then I can publish a more objective (and factual :) assessment of the merits of the method.

pyre15 lat temu

  > As soon as I'm looking at more than one programming or
  > markup language in the same file, I'm looking at
  > spaghetti code.

By this definition the following is 'spaghetti code':

  $dbh->do("delete from my_table");

Following his logic:

  1. Realize there's SQL and Perl in the same line.
  2. STOP EVERYTHING
  3. Start attempting to fully abstract SQL into Perl
     so that no one will ever need to write a line of
     SQL again.
  4. Die an old man, never having accomplished this task.

postfuturist15 lat temu

In small doses, you can get things done quickly like this. However, it builds up over time into a ball of spaghetti, so yeah, maybe after the 5th or 6th blob of inline SQL, you might think about using an abstraction while you still can. I've worked (and work) on old projects with hundreds of SQL queries spread throughout the code, it _is_ spaghetti code and there are better ways to do it.

pyre15 lat temu

  > I've worked (and work) on old projects with hundreds
  > of SQL queries spread throughout the code,

So have/do I. The fact that there is SQL inlined with the code is probably the least of your worries when talking about such a large/old code base.

postfuturist15 lat temu

Actually, the bits of SQL everywhere is the #1 problem with the code. We spent weeks just auditing them all to remove SQL injection vulnerabilities. All the SQL are fragile bits of code, difficult to write meaningful unit tests for, since you can't separate database interaction from logic, etc.

einhverfr15 lat temu

Been there too, which is why I like stored procedures now (testability, clean code, predictability).

einhverfr15 lat temu

The issue with inline SQL queries isn't the fact that SQL is mixed in with other programming languages itself. It's the propensity to write BAD SQL that's inlined because now you can apply the full power of the programming language to generate your SQL.

Stored procedures are a great way to abstract this out and force good SQL coding practices btw.

ars15 lat temu

> Stored procedures are a great way to abstract this out and force good SQL coding practices btw.

How exactly do stored procedures prevent you from writing "BAD SQL"? They do no such thing.

Stored procedures are a great way of adding complexity to your code, complexity equals bugs and longer development time. There are reasons for stored procedures, but using them simply to remove SQL from your front end is not one of them. And certainly not because of a fear of "BAD SQL".

einhverfr15 lat temu

How exactly do stored procedures prevent you from writing "BAD SQL"?

To be clear, they prevent one specific case of bad sql, namely queries that are written like this:

SELECT a.*, $col_list

  FROM $table a

  JOIN $second_table b ON $join

 WHERE $where

$group_by

$having;

Then when you go to find out how $where is define you see a lot of statements like:

if ($http_query->{date_from}){

   $where .= " AND date_entered > " . $dbh->quote($http_query->{date_from});

}

pyre15 lat temu

This is not always a bad thing. Consider the following:

  my $current_month = Month->new();
  my $end_month     = Month->new()->plus_months(4);
  while ($current_month <= $end_month) {
    $yyyymm = $current_month->strftme("%Y%m");
    $last_day = $current_month->last_date()->strftime("%Y%m%d");
    $first_day = $current_month->first_date()->strftime("%Y%m%d");
    
    $dbh->do("create table my_partitioned_table_$yyyymm
              () inherits from my_partitioned_table");
    $dbh->do("alter table my_partitioned_table_$yyyymm
              add constraint ck_my_partitioned_table_$yyyymm
              check (date between '$first_day'::Date and '$last_day'::Date)");

    $current_month->next_month();
  }

This makes sure that my_partitioned_table has month-based partitions 4 months into the future (so long as you keep it on cron).

enqk15 lat temu

And if you forbid that in perl and end up having query generation inside the stored procedure, what have you gained?

einhverfr15 lat temu

There are very few valid cases for stored procedures to generate queries like that. And at least with PostgreSQL, dynamic SQL can be spotted with automated searches pretty easily. It's pretty easy to simply add all filters that might be of interest:

WHERE (date_entered > in_date_from or in_date_from IS NULL) ....

Then you also gain testability. We can write test cases for the stored procedures because they have discrete entry points and make sure they are acting according to spec.

ars15 lat temu

Why can't you use that type of code in your frontend?

Stored procedures make it much harder to understand the code since you can't just read the query - you have to find the stored procedure and check it there. (And be realistic - no one has perfect documentation.)

And heaven forbid you have to change the query - now you need to make sure no one else is using it, and you end up with tons of versions of similar stored procedures, not all in use, and many that could be combined.

It doesn't seem worth it to me.

I use stored procedures for data reduction - I want to keep the data in the database, and process it before sending it out. (Saves bandwidth vs doing it in the front end, and often it's faster too.)

But that's it. Using stored procedures just to wrap ordinary queries is a terrible (but very common) idea. (I am aware that it saves time on generating a query plan, but usually that's a case of premature optimization.)

And using it to enforce code policies? Way overkill.

einhverfr15 lat temu

ars: I don't know if we have reached max depth or if it is just a waiting period. The major issues are:

1) Testability. you can write test cases against a stored proc. You cannot write test cases against a SQL query embedded in the middle of a function in another programming language.

2) Single point of control. You can have one function that runs the stored proc there and check properly for SQL injection, ensuring that everything is free of SQL injection as far as front-to-backend is concerned (and in Pg, that only leaves SQL injection issues in dynamic SQL which can be searched for and audited separately).

So that's why not to put it there.

As to changing the query.... I only use databases which come with transactional DDL so that's not an issue as long as inputs and outputs don't change. If the inputs and outputs have to change, we can handle that too with transactional DDL and the fact that we make the interfaces discoverable. In this case, we'd

BEGIN;

DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS foo_bar(...);

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION foo_bar(...)...;

COMMENT ON FUNCTION foo_bar(...) IS $$...$$;

COMMIT;

Because of the way Pg works this shouldn't really cause issues for currently running queries.

As for finding the right function, since these are all called on a declarative interface so you know what the function name is quickly, and so it is a matter of quickly finding it in a directory of SQL files.

As for testability, don't underrate this. You can insert data, run your tests, and roll back. So for example for our 1099-MISC and INT handling, we run more than 40 tests on a pre-written data set that we can run without ever committing to production and which will never conflict with production data (and therefore does not lock other users out). That's approx. 20 tests per sproc there.

notaddicted15 lat temu

I've actually seriously considered keeping all my SQL queries in their own files, and reading them into local variables on load. It would allow them to be tracked and edited individually... but I now use an ORM.

einhverfr15 lat temu

I do keep the SQL queries in their own files. The only difference is that they get loaded into the db (as stored procs) at first and then called by name. Works well.

draegtun15 lat temu

This is called the Phrasebook pattern and was probably being pushed as best practise until ORM's took hold.

* http://ootips.org/yonat/patterns/phrasebook.html

* http://www.perl.com/pub/2002/10/22/phrasebook.html

* https://metacpan.org/module/Data::Phrasebook::SQL

pyre15 lat temu

The point being that ORMs have limitations. Advocating that something is 'one-size-fits-all' is foolish (not claiming that that's what you're doing).

ExpiredLink15 lat temu

> .. but I now use an ORM.

"ORM is an anti-pattern": http://seldo.com/weblog/2011/08/11/orm_is_an_antipattern

einhverfr15 lat temu

Agreed ORM's are usually very sub-optimal. They make sense only because application developers aren't db people. And this is the problem.

I suspect for certain parts of some apps, ORM's might work OK. But in general for applications of any complexity they will break down hard and fast, and lead to bad db design, bad performance, or both.

MatthewPhillips15 lat temu

ORM is just less work. If you write in OOP you are already creating objects anyways. Then writing get, save, and update procedures is just a lot of extra work.

einhverfr15 lat temu

The problem is then you build databases around your ORM but if you are doing a single app database, why use an RDBMS at all?

In other words, I see an ORM as an antipattern because the subset of cases where it works really well at bridging the gap you probably don't really want an RDBMS in there anyway.

And if you do make it work (encapsulating your db behind updatable views) without running into this, it's a heck of a lot more work than hand-coding SQL.....

einhverfr15 lat temu

I don't consider that spaghetti code, but it does have problems. The big one is the tendency to assemble queries by string interpolation....

What we've done in LedgerSMB is quite simple. All db statements in new code (outside the mapper functions) are in stored procedures. Everything is mapped in there using a Perl API so in the new code (post-1.2) otherwise all SQL is in one set of files and all Perl is in another, with minimal overlap.

This sort of thing makes for very clean development. No, spaghetti code is making me have 15 files open in VIM trying to figure out which of them has the function that is being called in it, with several candidates all bearing the same function name (oh, the horrors).

draegtun15 lat temu

Instead of points 3 & 4 you could replace it with... 3. Load SQL module from CPAN.

Something like SQL::Abstract (https://metacpan.org/module/SQL::Abstract) or Fey (https://metacpan.org/module/Fey) would slot in easy for most tasks like this:

  use SQL::Abstract;
  my $sql = SQL::Abstract->new;

  $dbh->do( $sql->delete("my_table") );

luigi15 lat temu

I was inspired by this project for Node:

https://github.com/hij1nx/weld

And I tried the concept using Nokogiri in Ruby. I found that in practice it gets really tedious. I had to make sure that every single element I wanted to manipulate had a unique id. Then I had to account for updating the content of an element versus an arbitrary attribute for that element. Or adding an attribute, like some data-* attribute. I realized why string interpolation is just so much easier.

There's also the problem where the DOM parser changes the original HTML in some way. How will it deal with conditional comments for IE? Or slightly malformed HTML that you want to keep that way?

I ended up going back to Handlebars.

Harkins15 lat temu

Instead of including if/then/else logic in the template, templates are duplicated for each branch and the logic is pushed up to the controller. This takes on hand-managing duplicate code (because there will discrepancies between the "logged in" and "logged out" version every time someone forgets they need to change two files, or doesn't notice there is a second version to touch) to avoid having any code in templates (which it labels as technical debt without support).

This does not seem like a worthwhile tradeoff to me. And the author doesn't address loops, which often want to have special treatment of first or last elements, even/odd rows, and other small bits of logic. When you combine these things, you're going to have a combinatorial problem, I can just imagine a shopping cart table with templates like shopping_cart_item_list__table_row__last_item__logged_in__even_row__multiple_quantities__discounted_item.html

And what's with the really confrontational tone? This article would've been improved by spending a couple hundred fewer words putting words in the reader's mouth and insulting their tools/code. There's a chance this could be useful in some situations, but I sure don't want to spend any time talking to this guy.

dools15 lat temu

Loops with special treatment for first and last items is quite simply dealt with by including a list of items (for example) in the static HTML mockup, the first and last of which is different from the middle one.

EDIT: Also in response to the issue of double handling, I did mention this in the article:

In that second example of course, we've got a bunch of duplicate markup, but that's not our problem. That is the job of whatever system you're using to fragmentify your templates and re-use common assets

voidr15 lat temu

> A typical example written in PHP would look like this:

That's not how templating works, that's just some messed up code.

I totally disagree with the idea that having static HTML as templates and transforming them with DOM manipulation is better then templating. When you do DOM manipulations you make assumptions about the structure, if that structure is changed by somebody, you are screwed. The less assumptions you make the better. Also last time I checked DOM parsing was a relatively slow process, even if it would be better than templating it still has to justify the performance overhead.

Also let's not forget that writing if's are easier than writing DOM queries.

Templating allows separation of view logic and business logic, I find it much cleaner to have the view logic in the templates, this is in fact what the author complains about, but how is having both database calls and layout logic in the same place cleaner?

snprbob8615 lat temu

Funny, we've been doing this with a modified-Backbone.js site and have found it requires tedious, manual management of an excess of IDs and classes, plus an error-prone mountain of jQuery expressions.

What I'd really like to do is go 100% the other way: all functions, all the time.

A view could just be a named function, accepting the object(s) to be rendered as arguments, define some closures for callbacks/event handlers, then return a DOM structure.

Animus715 lat temu

I've been doing exactly that in my more recent projects, and it works extremely well for simpler views/shallow DOMS.

But it turns into write-only code pretty fast when you have tons of callbacks flying around for highly interactive elements.

snprbob8615 lat temu

For one-off actions, like the "save" and "cancel" buttons, callbacks don't descend into madness. Most UIs have very few commands which need true event handling. And the ones that do, the commands are often pretty simple one-button -> one-command. Sometimes many-buttons -> parameterized-command.

For everything else, you can use data-binding. If you're already writing lexically scoped render functions, you can trivially create a data-bindable local object in a variable to eliminate the event management process. Instead of an onclick event for a checkbox, you can trivially set the checked property to be equal to an observable value box containing a boolean. With the right abstractions, callback spaghetti is not an issue.

einhverfr15 lat temu

Well, the only time I have ever said exactly this was about SQL-Ledger which used a home-brewed template system (which sucks big time) and which is mostly spaghetti code (in the true sense, of logic wandering aimlessly between modules in ways difficult to understand and predict. Of course the fact that the template system sucked and the code was spaghetti were unrelated except the fact that they were authored by the same (IMHO inept) developer.

On to the article though.... I think that what the individual is discussing in fact is something different, which is the need for stable API's between layers of the application.

I am very skeptical of his idea that all projects can benefit from his proposed solution. Indeed in areas like complex reporting, a template is conceptually simpler than HTML mockups that have to be populated by Javascript. At that point XSLT on the client starts making a lot of sense.... However, not at all sure that's always a win compared to templates. But then XSL files pose all the issues he is complaining about!

The beauty of templates on the other hand is the ability to create diverse output. XSL is no different there. One can create a LaTeX file, an HTML file, a CSV. Anything else. For systems that need that diversity, going with HTML and Javascript is a net loss.

antirez15 lat temu

Solution: don't use templates, generate HTML from code with a DSL that makes HTML and code the same thing. There is no longer the designer/programmer separation, now with CSS designers can do everything if your HTML layout makes a bit of sense. Also there is no need to generate complex HTML as it was the case N years ago, it is mainly a semantical affair, and fits perfectly inside the code.

Templates suck, they fake an abstraction layer that actually does not exist since the code and the template are strictly connected in all the non trivial cases. It's just a lame substitution layer forcing you to switch from one file to the other while coding.

draegtun15 lat temu

> don't use templates, generate HTML from code with a DSL that makes HTML

I agree. This is how I've done it for last few years and have recommended it before on HN.

ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1518096 | http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=705706 | http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=705800

also: Web Development as Tag Soup - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=252185

judofyr15 lat temu

> There is no longer the designer/programmer separation, now with CSS designers can do everything if your HTML layout makes a bit of sense.

I'm sorry, but this is simply not true. You can't just magically move elements around in CSS without changing the markup. And even if you can accomplish a lot, many things will become very awkward as you try to tweak CSS in ways that was never intended.

I think we must just accept that we have a markup language (HTML; <p>, <strong> and so on), a way to style that (CSS) and a layout engine (CSS+HTML; <div>, <span> and so on).

dools15 lat temu

I think that having a separate DSL that abstracts HTML/CSS/JS is not the answer. When you abstract HTML (or SQL or whatever) you find that eventually your abstraction basically has to do everything that the thing you were abstracting needed to do in the first place.

I think the "just use CSS" or "we can boil HTML/CSS/JS down to a subset of reusable chunks" doesn't work. It's simpler to just let these technologies be what they are, and remove the need to care!

antirez15 lat temu

You are right, I don't mean "abstract HTML", I just mean to provide a way to generate it from code using the same syntax of your code. This is what I use:

https://github.com/antirez/lamernews/blob/master/app.rb#L138...

For instance to write

    <foo>
      <bar id="4">content</bar>
    </foo>

You write:

    H.foo {
        H.bar(:id => 4) {"content}
    }

So everything you can write in HTML you can write in this DSL, there is no real abstraction, but it is Ruby code like in all the rest of the application.

dools15 lat temu

Okay so now here is my problem with this: I can't just find whoever knows HTML/JS/CSS and get them to work on this by sending them a ZIP file with the interfaces in it. They have to install the environment and application and then iterate using this DSL, refreshing the page to see it in the browser.

It is far easier to find a really good designer, who knows HTML/CSS and a bit of JS (probably jQuery) than it is to find a really good designer, who knows HTML/CSS and a bit of JS (probably jQuery) and then is also comfortable configuring a Rails environment and also proficient enough with coding Ruby to learn quickly and without support or input, this custom DSL.

There are already so many people that have the skills you need, why force the issue? Let the technologies be what they are. In my experience, communication between team members is the single highest cost in building software. Unless you're a designer/developer or you're working with a small team on your startup and you happen to have all the skills you need right there in one office and timezone, you'll need to confront the issues of resourcing, iteration and staff changeovers - what I'm advocating is that we play to the prevailing skill separations and reduce the communication overhead.

draegtun15 lat temu

Think of your HTML as being data along the same lines of JSON, XML or any other data feed. Then tell your designer/front-end person to just create the necessary CSS & Javascript to apply to it.

Thus you remain in full control of the data (HTML) and you've completely separated the design (CSS) & behaviour (JS) logic that gets applied to it.

extension15 lat temu

Views have logic, sometimes very complex logic. If views are not allowed to have "code" in them, or are functionally crippled in some way, then presentation logic is probably going to get mixed in with the domain model, because there won't be any other place to put it. The programmer needs to have complete discretion in where they draw the line between domain and presentation.

This codeless view mythos arose because HTML includes a lot of rich interactive capabilities, and it's tempting to declare that these capabilities are all you will ever need in your presentation layer, but that is arbitrary and false.

In most other contexts, e.g. GUI programming, a codeless view is nonsensical. Code is everywhere. And if it's difficult to write nice view code, that's likely a problem with your programming language and/or your APIs.

Also, don't conflate model/presentation separation with server/client separation. Ideally, they are orthogonal concerns. To create the best UX, your views, and possibly your models, will have to straddle the network.

In short, don't let your technology stack dictate how you modularize your application.

thurn15 lat temu

What he's describing is best realized in the Enlive templating library for Clojure. You perform a suite of transformations on regular html files.

draegtun15 lat temu

Push style template is a phrase I've seen used to describe these kind of templating systems: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238885

CyruzDraxs15 lat temu

The moment a programmer thinks they know the ultimate solution to a problem is the moment they understand the problem the least.

No, templating is not perfect. Nothing a programmer does is perfect. Our job, as programmers, is to make stuff suck less. We break stuff until it works. We squash bugs until we can't find any more. That doesn't mean what we've built is perfect. It means what we've built is the best we could build with our current understanding of the problem.

I don't think of spaghetti code as the presence of logic in presentation code, I think of it as a lack of separation of what SHOULD logically be abstracted. I find the code it labels evolves over time as the common abstraction level of things increases and we move closer and closer to fully isolating concerns.

ronreiter15 lat temu

You are plain simply wrong. First of all, logic in templates is something which is OK to have. Different templates display information in different manners. Second thing, I don't think you've seen how awful and unmaintained code which manipulates DOM instead of templating looks like.

dools15 lat temu

The point I'm making, though, is that the challenge of solving "maintainability of DOM manipulation code" is a simpler problem to solve than the creation of the perfect templating language.

What's more, a good DOM manipulation strategy and library can be really easily ported to any language, freeing up your templates to go wherever you may feel is appropriate in the future.

rickmb15 lat temu

The main problem isn't templating engines. And although a better solution is always welcome, a bit of procedural code inside a template is not a big problem either.

The real problem is that so many projects and frameworks don't have a powerful enough View layer that is separate from the (preferably optional) templating engine. In many cases it's even worse, and the templating engine is the entire implementation of the view layer. This pushes a lot of view logic into the templates, where it quickly degenerates into spaghetti. (In even worse cases, any logic the templating engine can't handle gets coded inside the controllers, and view logic starts leaking through the layers.)

Fragmentation into purely static templates is only a solution if you've dealt with with all the other view-related issues, and still end up with too much logic in your templates. And by "too much" I mean that it results in errors and maintenance overhead, not just that it looks ugly.

Intensive use of logic inside templates is definitely a code smell, but you have to be careful not to address the wrong problem. The templating method itself is rarely the root cause.

llimllib15 lat temu

Yeah, well, your website sucks and doesn't load.

dools15 lat temu

It seems to be serving that page in around 5 - 7 seconds but it's pretty heavily loaded. Yes I wish I'd gotten around to doing all that stuff that I know I should do in order to make it load faster than it does right now.

PS: If the site didn't load, how do you know it sucks?

ichc-werker15 lat temu

Hey dools, these two images are broken for me:

Instead of splitting up the task of templating in the following, arbitrary fashion: [broken]

We can create a non-arbitrary, completely objective separation where the view/template layer truly contains no logic what so ever: [broken]

Cool article; made me think about how I've been handling views. I think I agree with you, but I'll need to mull it over for a while. Thanks!

X-Istence15 lat temu

He has hotlinked to ditaa.org and that server has fallen over.

dools15 lat temu

Yeah unfortunately - I didn't actually mean to do that. I don't even have a cached copy of those images :(

jamesaguilar15 lat temu

Solely with respect to your post script: a website that doesn't work pretty much always sucks.

barumrho15 lat temu

But now aren't you putting design into logic?

saurik15 lat temu

At first I thought this (and even typed out a long explanation of "the reason why you cannot make the assumption that your resulting document will be manipulated with DOM" involving "what if you want to change the presentation layer to PDF"), but then I realized that nowhere did he advocate mixing the DOM manipulation into his other logic; it could just as easily be a completely separate pile of "presentation to HTML" code that was entirely unrelated to the "generate content to present" layer.

barumrho15 lat temu

Hmm. I do understand what you are saying, but in most cases where you are outputting HTML, how is this really different from using templates? I see templates as a way to reduce redundant code. The examples on the blog post are simple (e.g. removing a node, which is easier with 'if' statement), but it will probably be messier.

Regarding alternative formats like JSON or PDF, I guess you can add a layer there.

saurik15 lat temu

First off, let me be clear (as I'm concerned that your bringing up this unrelated "messier" argument is the beginning of me being used as a proxy for the author): I am not generally arguing in favor, I was simply countering that specific argument against. I will now describe why they are different, but I do not want this to be taken as a defense of the method.

The way it is different is that it is an inversion of control inside the template, not that it is changing up the layering. You still have a "construct data" layer and a "present data" later, and you can still swap out the "present data" layer with something unrelated, such as a normal template engine or whatever else you wish to use to generate JSON or PDF.

However, inside the "template", rather than having HTML with embedded logic (where you can almost envision the HTML calling into the logic to insert text or execute flow control at specific points), you instead have logic that manipulates the HTML via DOM, modifying the HTML to contain text at specific points. You could probably even make a compelling argument that these are duals of each other.

dools15 lat temu

Precisely - in fact, if you want to change the output to JSON, you don't need the HTML templates at all. You just use the same code you were going to use to extract the data from your persistence layer and then output it however you want.

wwweston15 lat temu

I have a sneaking suspicion that for all the worthiness of the principle of separation of concerns, it's impossible to completely decouple presentation and logic -- you're going to either end up having some degree of model-related logic bubble up into the view, or you're going to have some kind of presentation-related logic seep down into the view.

What we've generally done as an industry is accept the former, but I'm not sure whether one is better than the other.

wwweston15 lat temu

I've been thinking about some of the ideas in this rant for a while now. I might not have put it in quite such an opinionated manner (templating systems aren't usually my biggest problem), but I pretty much agree with a few things:

1) Fragmentation is a problem, particularly with some templating systems. Layouts should almost always be a single file. Things going inside the layout should probably be single files.

2) As long as templating means sprinkling extra tokens to process throughout a document, there's going to be some coupling problems. Transforming a document based on some external criteria is an interesting alternative.

There's certainly a number of transformation based solutions out there, some of them pretty powerful. But as I was thinking about this a few years ago, it occurred to me that maybe I don't want a powerful uber-transform set so much as I want a simple descriptive set of semantics for addressing content into nodes of a document.

Then I thought about where I'd seen this kind of thing come up before in the realm of document styling: DSSSL and XSLT vs CSS. The simple descriptive CSS won out and has worked out more or less well.

So... I came up with something I called `CAST` (Content-addressed Style Templating):

http://weston.canncentral.org/web_lab/CAST/about.html

Basically, you use a subset of CSS selectors (or XPath queries) to pick out a node of a document, then you specify a content rule, and the engine drops a content string into the document node.

I ended up writing my blog around the idea. I ended up being pretty happy with a very simple set of rules, despite the fact that there's not much too the system beyond that -- for example, there are no rules for conditionally hiding a node based on whether or not it's needed, no rules for repeating certain nodes. I think those things might be nice, but it turned out if I was willing to push a little bit of the view down into model layer, I didn't need them at all, and I was (I kindof tend to think that any application is going to have a bit of model-view bleed-across anyway, you just have to figure out how you'd like to manage it).

If anybody's curious, this post made me get off my behind and put the code up on GitHub:

https://github.com/westonc/CAST/

But it's in PHP, which I suppose will probably turn off a lot of the cool kids, so I should probably write a Ruby or Clojure version. :)

dools15 lat temu

Yep this is pretty much the idea. The key thing is, though: however you do it on the backend, that's entirely a coding problem. DOM manipulation sucks? Well, solve that problem, which is where something like your CAST library comes in.

It's easier to solve the problem of making a nice, easy way to "address" content (I used "animate" but basically they're the same thing :) than it is to solve the multitude of problems caused by choosing a technology stack and creating templates in it for your application.

einhverfr15 lat temu

To be clear, the primary use case here is in a case like Etsy, right? This doesn't work so well when we want to have a consistent interface to create HTML, PDF, CSV, XLS, and ODS files, correct?

Presumably DOM manipulation really can't be done beyond applications which are HTML-only in any reasonable sense without getting back to the things you don't like about templating, right?

wwweston15 lat temu

With good markup semantics and some conversion tools, you probably could generate PDF, CSV, XLS, and ODS from HTML. Some of the more powerful document transformation engines do feats like this.

I don't know, though. I tend to think that this is less a job for the view (and templates) than it is for smart models, or models with some kind of helper that assists them in knowing how to represent themselves in a given format.

dools15 lat temu

Well, the thing is that if your target output isn't HTML, then you wouldn't need to do any DOM manipulation. You'd just output whatever else it is you want to output (JSON, XML, PDF, whatever).

If you had, for example, a bunch of PDF code as a "template PDF" then you might just load that and do string replacement on whatever placeholder text you have in there - but yeah the primary use case I'm thinking of is in implementing web based interfaces.

dools15 lat temu

Sorry einhverfr I can't reply to your comment - but what I think you're talking about is trying to abstract display for HTML, PDF, LaTeX, whatever into a common markup language or template, then repurpose that markup for each output format. Does that sound correct?

So like, you'd want to be able to have something like:

  <article>
        <title><% print article.title %></title>
  </article>

then do something like:

  $tpl->article = fetchSomeArticleFromTheDb()
  $tpl->output('template_name',Format::PDF)

My argument to that would be that there's no realy need for that abstraction - you don't gain anything by it because you have to have some abstracted output engine that is capable of doing that HTML can already do, which is like, HTML :)

Hey, I'd love to continue the discussion, but I think the HN comments are kind of limited in how much they want you to discuss here, feel free to email me [email protected]

EDIT: oops, code formatting

einhverfr15 lat temu

Just to be clear, I am not entirely hostile to the idea here. I just think that there are plenty of cases where generating high quality printed content or the like doesn't work with it and templating is a lot cleaner in those environments. And when your application already requires templating for a reason like that, adding an entirely different way of handling another output format adds needless complexity.

One of the useful applications of dools' ideas is that you could have a mockup which included lorem ipsums or other dummy text. This would make it easier for web developers to test layout.

OTOH, as I say, I am not at all convinced that it is a net win for programs that generate multiple formats of output./

einhverfr15 lat temu

Not really. I will email you though :-)

I will probably post something on the selection and design of our templating system for LedgerSMB in my blog too (http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com) by the end of the week.

einhverfr15 lat temu

But then you'd still be back to templating, right?

So if you want a consistent interface, templating is pretty clearly the way to go, correct?

carsongross15 lat temu

The idea of templating as a separate activity from coding is what, in my opinion, is wrong. It comes from the days when "front end" guys didn't want javascript or "back end" logic in their files. Personally, I would just prefer that the code for a button be located with that button. Crazy, I know.

Back in the day (2001) I didn't understand the separation of logic and presentation, although I grudgingly admitted that the front end guys had a lot of stuff to worry about that I didn't understand (cross browser issues, rendering issues). These days, with jquery and widely available standards compliant browsers, plus all the design resources available on the web, we should all be both front end and back end developers, to a greater or lesser extent.

So we should strive to have clean code, but that, IMO, doesn't have nearly as much to do with separating concerns like templating and application logic as the "pure-templates" guys think.

I disagree with the "pure-model" and "pure-controller" guys on the back end for the same reasons. They fall into the same platonic manichaeism: the world is a mess and if only The One Pure Way were followed, we'd be good. Instead, grouping things logically as best we can and trying to minimize spooky action at a distance ("where the hell is the code associated with this button coming from?!?!") should be the goal.

[deleted]15 lat temu

cousin_it15 lat temu

I agree that putting code in templates can lead to spaghetti. But the OP's proposed solution seems suboptimal because loosely coupling the template to the application code via "template animation" will lead to convoluted code with lots of hardcoded IDs on the application side, and brittleness on the template side because there's no way to see which IDs are used by the application.

A less extreme but more practical solution would be to disallow code in templates by making templates accept a data structure, like JSON, and giving them the bare minimum of capabilities to render it. So looping over an array is okay, checking for the existence of a property is okay, but querying the database from the template is impossible by construction. This way you also get language independence because many languages can generate JSON. Also, you can have compile time error detection (for both the template and the application code) if you use some sort of schema for the data structure, like Thrift or Protocol Buffers.

dendory15 lat temu

I always get entertained reading the latest stories about templates and the latest innovations on how to make web sites work, and how (language x) is so old now, and everyone should use (language y) because it's more logical. I built my own custom CMS in 2008 and have been slowly improving it, and to this day I have a full dynamic site working on less than 600 lines of PHP, HTML and JavaScript. No JQuery, no need for a dozen includes, or keeping up to date on the latest patches of 12 different code bases. Yet the site keeps chugging along, even got to the front page of HN without any issue handling the load, while some sites mysteriously go down, but it's never the developer's fault, they just had a problem with their backend db server, or forgot a critical patch, or ne of their libraries didn't behave well with another library under heavy load...

Not sure what my point is, I guess that there's something to be said for keeping it simple, and not chasing new technologies without reason..

dools15 lat temu

Glad I could entertain :)

cheeaun15 lat temu

This approach reminds me of hquery (for Ruby on Rails) by choonkeat:

http://blog.choonkeat.com/weblog/2008/10/hquery-an-unobtrusi...

https://github.com/choonkeat/hquery

dools15 lat temu

Yes! In fact, in the Q&A he even says this:

Nope. "hquery" is just a library I wrote to do USS in Rails. I believe any language / framework can have its own USS renderer.

I'm totally in agreement on this. Any language or framework can address this very simply - we don't need "one to rule them all".

jasonlotito15 lat temu

So, he's trying to rewrite XSLT. Gotcha.

eob15 lat temu

Been working on something like this for a while and nearing a big push of version 1 to github. Glad others feel the same way!

dools15 lat temu

Make sure and post about it when you do - I definitely want to see more momentum around this and was pleasantly surprised when I saw that solutions already existed. My favourite thing about it is that it transcends "technology". The fact that you've been working on this is no loss to someone else who's been working on something similar as the cost of changing from one solution to another is so dramatically low when all the value is retained within the templates themselves.

eob15 lat temu

Likewise. Two other template engines you might be interested in are Knockout.js (http://knockoutjs.com/) and the template engine from the Lift web framework. Both play relatively well within HTML.

And Stanford has done some nice work on segmenting the DOM into semantic chunks. The site appears to be down now, but it's usually hosted at http://bricolage.stanford.edu/. Check out their paper on the "Bento" algorithm.

sorenbs15 lat temu

The lift book is worth a quick look if you are interested in templating engines. In short, instead of logic in the view, css selectors are used on the server side to transform small chunks of the website in a statically typed and safe (the dom structure is carried around as xml instead of a string which makes it possible to prevent most of the common security problems on the web) way http://simply.liftweb.net/

judofyr15 lat temu

I've talked about "template animation" (or "mockup-driven development" as I've called it) before, but focused mostly on how to achieve static files that can easily be opened in the browser (without any server components) and still be modular (layouts/partials): http://timelessrepo.com/mockup-driven-development

This article seems to solve modularity by splitting it out into different files. On the same page you can have dozens of modules that can have several different states;how are you supposed to combine them all? How do you say "this page contains a sidebar, a blog post, comment section" and that there should be a "new comment"-form if the user is logged in and "delete"-links if the user is a moderator? In the example in the article, it seems that would be solved by having blog_post.html, blog_post_logged_in.html and blog_post_moderator.html, where 90% of the content in the files are duplicated.

Beside, in the example templates you can't actually open the templates in a browser (because it only contains the content, not the stylesheets, script-tags etc. that you need). So if the designer wants to see how it actually looks, he still needs a server that can wrap the layout around it.

Okay, but maybe you don't need the "view this template without running the server"-requirement. I'd still argue that dools' current approach is brittle. The reason is that he's now tying together two layers (the template layer and the animation layer) and there's no easy way to see what the animation layer will actually do. This means that small changes in the template might invalidate the animation. You really don't want to re-write the animation just because the designer switched from <h3> to <h2>.

This problem is easily solvable though: Use custom attributes which doesn't conflict with HTML/CSS:

    <form>
      <dl class="error" id="whatevsError" animate="error">
        <dt>You have to do something about this</dt>
        <dd>The reason we ask you do do this is so that we can laugh all the way to the bank</dd>
      </dl>
      <dl>
        <dt><label for="whatevs">Whatevs:</label></dt>
        <dd><input type="text" name="whatevs" id="whatevs" /></dd>
      </dl>
    </form>

However, as you're adding more features to these attributes, you'll actually end up with another template language; it just happens to be encoded in HTML/XML. From here on we might wondering, why should we "hide" the logic inside attributes (where it can be easy to miss) when we can use a more distinctive and effective syntax?

To summarize:

- If you want to separate the template and the animation (so that you can easily change the template without updating the animation) you need to stay away from HTML/CSS-semantics and use custom attributes/tags that you know won't conflict.

- If you use custom attributes/tags you've essentially created another language which deals with the logic for you.

- If you don't care about the "view the templates without running a server", you might as well use a completely different syntax (which probably is going to be easier to understand than the "hide everything in the DOM"-approach).

dools15 lat temu

These are great points, and I certainly agree that some convention is required in template development to ensure "less brittleness". I think it's simple enough to do this with ids and classes, though, and even when it does break, the time it takes to fix it is going to have a pretty trivial impact on your overall project because the problem is solvable, quite simply and without much hunting around, by one person without the need to communicate with anyone else on the team.

Regarding the logic issue, I don't think you'd realistically end up with an intractable number of logic variations. If you have extra links that are there when the moderator is logged in, they should be there in any template with that structural element in it and then removed if the person logged in isn't a moderator.

Granted, though, I have to put my money where my mouth is and port one of my existing applications over to using this methodology (which is, in fact, what I plan to do so the proof the pudding will be in the eating).

Regarding the issue of "viewing the template without a server" - in the case of Fragmentify, all the frontend dev needs is the standard apache/php that ships with OSX. This is considerably less complex than having an entire framework/application environment installed and kept current. That being said, however, the way in which templates arrive at the "animator" is not the animator's problem. Dreamweaver lets you edit common assets and then exports head-to-foot complete HTML files in a ZIP, so just use that. So long as the "animotor" has complete HTML files to work with, that's all that matters.

hetman15 lat temu

You're assuming the breakage will be something obvious and clearly visible. No doubt many of them will be.

However, I would foresee plenty of breakages in obscure or not immediately apparent places which may not be noticed for some time. For example they may be minor (yet still very annoying for users stumbling on them) or apparent in only certain circumstances.

dools15 lat temu

Well - that's kinda what testing is for. It would remain to be seen whether or not this proves to really be the intractable problem you're imagining it to be - let's not forget that any other method will also produce bugs. The question is whether they're produced at the same rate or not. I have no evidence to really say whether or not what you're imagining would be prohibitive to using this method but my (strong) opinion is that it wouldn't be (time will tell as I put this into practice though, and I'll be following up with more posts about it).

judofyr15 lat temu

> I think it's simple enough to do this with ids and classes, though, and even when it does break, the time it takes to fix it is going to have a pretty trivial impact on your overall project because the problem is solvable.

The real issue is that now the designer needs to mentally figure out "is this a safe refactoring" for every change. Because he doesn't have the real application running there, he can't verify if it works or not. I fear that this might lead to "leave the markup alone; change CSS only"-mentality from the designers because they don't want to introduce the animators for a simple design change. (You might say that changing only the CSS was the "right" solution anyway, but sometimes things becomes more much simpler when you can e.g. just wrap something in a div).

> If you have extra links that are there when the moderator is logged in, they should be there in any template with that structural element in it and then removed if the person logged in isn't a moderator.

Aha, but how can the designer see how it looks like for regular users? He probably wants to make sure that it looks good without the link too (maybe it's more like a button which floats). It seems like a sub-optimal workflow to manually remove the link (or display:none it) every time he works on the regular user page. (He must also remember to put it back in.)

> This is considerably less complex than having an entire framework/application environment installed and kept current.

Fair enough.

> … Dreamweaver …

If an editor can make it easier to work with the templates, that's good. Just don't make it impossible to work with the files unless you use some proprietary editor…

djbender15 lat temu

This is so confrontational, I couldn't even read it. Stop putting words in my mouth.

X-Istence15 lat temu

I've been waiting about 4 minutes for his web server to send me down the bits for the site.

---

Your hotlinks to ditaa.org seem to be down because the server on the other end is serving stack traces ...

DarkMeld15 lat temu

Having to loop through arrays to translate data into html elements is the majority of the problem. I'd be happy with just a solution to that.

Alexandervn15 lat temu

Isn't this all the same?

<span><?=$salary?></span> <span>{{ salary }}</span> <span id="salary"></span>

bergie15 lat temu

There is one important difference: the server-side templating engine will probably retain the id attribute in the last case, meaning that the templating information remains usable also on client-side.

We use RDFa for somewhat similar purposes.

buster15 lat temu

Isn't this 2011 where web pages use Ajax and contain a lot of logic, because.. well.. Javascript and stuff?

zobzu15 lat temu

its a little more like native software's gui. that is, with website templating, its, well, template driven. pieces of codes are here and there in the template, following template's will.

with software, your app is code driven. the gui follows what the code tells, instead.

even if in both cases you have a mvc these days.

jeremymcanally15 lat temu

Sounds like he wants Pakyow: http://pakyow.com

dools15 lat temu

Hmm not really. I mean, what I want is HTML/JavaScript/CSS and then absolutely anything I choose on the backend. The framework is completely irrelevant. The fact that there is an "itemprop" attribute in the Pakyow view construction already invalidates it as an option for achieving what I'm putting forward here.

gnorsot15 lat temu

I hate templating. There are just so many engines to choose from and you end up writing your own because none of them can do what you really need.

einhverfr15 lat temu

Dude.... I get laughed at for the things I do with templates (html page with 20k input elements) until people realize what I am doing with them (a bulk payment interface for paying 5000 invoices in a compact workflow).

I have found that any complete templating system has sufficient flexibility and extensibility to do what you want. Though I use Perl's Template Toolkit.

peteforde15 lat temu

It's a drag when what you're working on is such a unique snowflake that nothing really smart teams have worked on for years is able to help you.

I'm going to abuse a Bruce Schneier quote and suggest that if you're trying to get a job done and you start by writing a template interpreter, you're doing it wrong.

ronreiter15 lat temu

What are you building there? A nuclear reactor?

einhverfr15 lat temu

Probably a web-based one at that.

zobzu15 lat temu

Show HN: our HTML5 nuclear reactor.

Oh dear. "BUT, ITS SANDBOXED ITS OK!" :)

einhverfr15 lat temu

Only functions properly on worstations powered by Intel Unobtanium Chips ;-)

grandpoobah15 lat temu

Find the syntax you are most comfortable with and you'll always find something inspired by it in your next language.

As someone who really loved Jinja2 templates, I was very pleased to find Swig on Node.

yycom15 lat temu

An article without a byline has zero credibility.

rimantas15 lat temu

They guy is wrong thinking that business logic does not exist. Then it all goes downhill from there. Extremely narrow view of the world he does not even try to uderstand.

generators15 lat temu