RFC: template engine [ was: Re: Implementing tables - advice wanted ]

[Yariv Sadan]

Hi,

> Indeed, these four characteristics seem to be all we need and is in
> line with mine and others' intuition that a template engine should
> _not_ be a Turing complete language.

I would like to bring up one more point in favor of using Erlang as a
template language: ehtml. With an Erlang template language, you could
write code such as

<%=
       {ehtml, {table, [], {
            lists:foldl(fun(E, A) ->
                [{tr, [], {td, [{width, 20}], E#person.name}} | A]
         end, [], dict:get(people, Data))}
        }
      },
%>

in the template file. I think there's little doubt that this code does
not belong in the controller, and that an ehtml tuple generated with
pure Erlang is quite elegant.

My 2c.

Regards,
Yariv