[Grok-dev] Re: Skinning/themeing

[Martin Aspeli]

Martijn Faassen wrote:

> I don't think we can make a very strong for the benefits of a different 
> template language from a programmer's perspective. No template language 
> I've seen is *that* much better than ZPT. You can argue increased 
> convenience and you can argue a lesser conceptual overhead (no path 
> expressions, perhaps), but those are not very strong reasons to switch. 
> You could also argue increased performance (but that would require using 
> something like Mako).
> 
>  From an evolution and maintenance perspective, it might make sense to 
> go to a template language the Zope community is not supporting. We would 
> not need to document it or maintain it, or optimize it. Genshi is 
> currently the only language in the Python world I know about that has a 
> significantly broad community around it to make this potentially 
> worthwhile. (not that Genshi is actually faster than ZPT; I believe 
> currently it's somewhat slower)
> 
> Anyway, I'm not pushing for switching to Genshi as the official template 
> language today. If I ever will, that is quite a while off, in the Grok 
> 2.0 era or something. What I am pushing for is template language 
> neutrality in the more near future. One of the motivations is the 
> ability to switch later, but since it'd be good engineering anyway to 
> support multiple template languages we can just forge ahead with this, 
> no matter what we will decide to do later.
> 
> Flexibility is what Zope 3 is all about, and Grok inherits this, so it 
> fits in our philosophy. Grok just needs to say "yeah, but this is the 
> one we use in all the examples and all our own code" in addition to that.

As usual, you're right - and I agree with this approach. ;)

Martin