Comments on: ErlTL 0.9.1

By: Charles

Charles — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 03:38:29 +0000

Thank you for ErlTL, Yariv!
I used it with yaws and appmods. It’s much simpler than sheer ehtml (In fact they can be combined). It’s also so handy when used in a home-grown embedded mini-httpd server to deliver dynamic pages.

By: Roberto

Roberto — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:29:58 +0000

Now I started to use ErlTL, and I really like it. Works fine with Aptana-Eclipse-HTML-Editor and yes, pattern matching is the best thing since slide breed !!!

By: mikkom

mikkom — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 09:58:26 +0000

I might be a little bit biased because I have implemented my own web development environment (including a very, very simple template language) with erlang and many before that, even when cgi was a new thing and we did our web development with C.

Anyways, I really recommend reading this document, it’s one of the best ever written about templates and I bet it will give you some great ideas:

http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~parrt/papers/mvc.templates.pdf

It’s extremely important to understand the actual position of templates before you start implementing a language of your own because otherwise you will end up with something that will bind logic with presentation and (believe me, I have done this too many times) it’s really hard to separate afterwards.

ps. I could not live without pattern matching anymore.

By: Yariv

Yariv — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 09:24:32 +0000

One more thing – Java and PHP don’t have pattern matching! :)

By: Yariv

Yariv — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 09:17:58 +0000

Yes… I know about some of those template languages. But I needed something that was quick to implement, that was an improvement over .yaws files and ehtml, that had good performance, and that would interact well with other Erlang code. I might add more high-level syntax in the future but I needed this starting point.

Btw, Rails quite successfully uses ERb, which is similar in concept to ErlTL.

Thanks for the feedback!

By: mikkom

mikkom — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 03:15:24 +0000

Sorry to say my opinion but that template syntax is almost exactly what web developers have tried to get away from in another languages. (that’s why java has custom tags and jstl instead of plain jsp, that’s why there are templating frameworks even for php).

I really suggest studying evolution in java web templating frameworks, you will find gold nuggets of information there.