Axant Tech Blog

Alternatives 2.0

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | Opensource, Software Development, Web

You may know that ruby and rails hype is fading and there are lots of interesting platform that have the same good points of rails like the rapid development even if they are almost unknown. Some, like the perl catalyst, are faster, other like the new python turbogears provide everything rails gives you and overall in a cleaner, more rational shape.

Obviously you hardly heard about them or how good they are since there isn’t enough people blogging and gloating about how good they are or how many kool points your achieve by using them.

Well I’ll start some small post about it with some obviously biased comparisons, just to raise curiosity and foster discussion, let’s start with the template engines.

Catalyst suggests the use of TT by default. It is fast, quite lightweight and simplifies the perl constructs a bit.

Rails has erb as template engine with some faster implementations than the stock ones like erubis (that usually saves your day once you notice how pitiful rails is about performances).

Turbogears let you pick whatever you like, but right now suggests/bundles genshi since it’s quite fast, uses an xml compliant markup so you may edit it with your favourite xml/xhtml editor, the parser will error out if what you wrote isn’t compliant to your dtd/schema giving you a nice output pointing where it is broken like tidy does for you static content, since it is xml you may generate rich xhtml pages embedding svg and mathml with relative ease.

That’s all I hope someone will debate if is better have your template engine use a more compact markup even if then you cannot use it common tools to edit your views structure or the possibility to fully harness xml good points out weights the relative verbosity.

I will discuss ORM and models in the next post.