[PyCS-devel] RFC: templating system proposal

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Hi!

I again looked at templating systems for python and stumbled across
Cheetah, the templatingsystem behind webware. This can easily be used
without webware, is a simple setup.py install and quite simple to use. And
it goes IMO nicely with the other toolkits we use, PyCS goes more for the
simple and small than for the big and bloated (we do use Metakit and not
some big database).

The homepage:

http://www.cheetahtemplate.org/

A quite good summary on cheetah and comparisons with other templating
systems (especially a reasoning why not ZPT):

http://www.cheetahtemplate.org/Py10.html

The users guide for using cheetah:

http://www.cheetahtemplate.org/docs/users_guide_html/

If somebody want's to install it into the pycs python:

# this is one line, press enter for the password
cd $HOME/src/cvs
-d:pserver:ano...@cv...:/cvsroot/cheetahtemplate
login

# this is one line
cvs
-d:pserver:ano...@cv...:/cvsroot/cheetahtemplate
co Cheetah

cd $HOME/src/Cheetah
$HOME/pycs/bin/python setup.py build
$HOME/pycs/bin/python setup.py install

I think it is quite nice, templates have useable template language with
the usual language constructs, although it doesn't follow the "everything
tags and attributes" line like ZPT or DTML or PSP. The benefit is, you can
use cheetah for every fileformat you want, even if it isn't some tagbased
format.

The usage of templates is quite simple (transliterated from the doc):

from Cheetah.Template import Template
templateDef = ("<html><head><title>$title</title></head>" +
   "<body><h1>$title</h1>$body</body></html>")

class myTemplate(Template):
   title = "test"
   body = "test"

templ = myTemplate(templateDef)
print templ
templ.title = "test"
templ.body = "Another test"
print templ

This makes quite nice python code, and the template language isn't too
bad. So I would say "go for it", if there are no objections to this
package.

Comments?

bye, Georg