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

[Paul Boddie]

On Friday 15 April 2005 20:45, mike bayer 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?

First, let me respond to this. There's nothing to stop anyone from packaging a 
lot of this stuff together, and if the community moves forward with more 
convenient installation mechanisms, then perhaps no-one will need to package 
anything together except for extreme convenience. I was arguing against the 
tendency for framework developers to more or less *glue* template languages 
onto Web programming APIs - see the quoted text below for a good example.

> theres a tradeoff of initial setup vs. user choice in how they generate
> their output.  pushing one specific template approach favors it over all
> the others, and a lot of good ideas in all the rejected ones get blown
> away.  the python community, being a brainy bunch, has a particularly wide
> variety of html generation approaches...I think this diversity should not
> be discouraged.

Way back, after my frameworks comparison ended up on the PythonInfo Wiki, I 
tried to start a comparison of "presentation technologies" because I saw this 
as an important aspect of Web programming. Sadly, such overviews were tidied 
away after a "refactoring" of that Wiki, and I lost any interest in keeping 
it up-to-date. However, such a resource would be very important, I think.

> i would compare to Java Server Pages, which are klunky and hard to use,
> and how every java-based site is built with crappy looking and hard to
> debug JSP templates, since "thats what you use", despite the existence of
> other java-based approaches which are pretty much ignored.

Indeed, Struts - for a long time the Java framework with most mindshare - is 
only really a rationalisation of JSP best practices, and coincidentally it 
has enjoyed similar levels of hype (some justified, perhaps) as Rails now 
does. Perhaps it's also a coincidence that some of the more vocal advocates 
of Rails are J2EE old hands who have "found" dynamic languages.

Paul