# WLang [![Build Status](https://secure.travis-ci.org/blambeau/wlang.png?branch=wlang2)](http://travis-ci.org/blambeau/wlang) WLang is a powerful code generation and templating engine, implemented on top of [temple](https://github.com/judofyr/temple) and much inspired by the excellent [mustache](http://mustache.github.com/). **WLang2 is still work in progress**. ## Links * http://github.com/blambeau/wlang * http://blambeau.github.com/wlang * http://rubygems.org/gems/wlang * http://revision-zero.org/wlang ## Features * Tunable templating engine. You can define your own tags, and their behavior. * Powerful logic-less HTML concretization to render web pages à la Mustache with extra. * Compiled templates for speedy generation. * [Tilt](https://github.com/rtomayko/tilt) and [Sinatra](https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra) integration. WLang 2.0 also has a few remaining issues. * It does not support rubinius so far, due to an incompatibility with the Citrus parser generator. * It has some issues with spacing; not a big issue for HTML rendering but might prevent certain generation tasks. ## Tunable templating engine WLang is a templating engine, written in ruby. In that, it is similar to ERB, Mustache and the like: ```ruby WLang::Html.render 'Hello to ${who}!', who: 'you & the world' # => "Hello you & the world!" ``` To output HTML pages, WLang does not provides you with killer features or extraordinary shortcus. It supports escaping, as shown above, but many other templating engines do. For such HTML tasks, WLang does a pretty good job but many other engines perform faster and have nicer features. See the examples folder that documents WLang::Html. WLang is designed to help you for other uses cases, user-defined ones in particular, such as generating code or whatever text generation task for which other engines quickly become inappropriate. WLang helps there because it allows you to create your own _dialect_, that is, you can define your own tags and their behavior. For instance, ```ruby class Highlighter < WLang::Dialect def highlight(buf, fn) var_name = render(fn) var_value = evaluate(var_name) buf << var_value.to_s.upcase end tag '$', :highlight end Highlighter.render('Hello ${who}!'), who: 'you & the world' # => "Hello YOU & THE WORLD !" ``` WLang already provides a few useful dialects, such as WLang::Html (inspired by Mustache but a bit more powerful in my opinion). If they don't match your needs, it is up to you to define you own dialect for making your generation task easy. Have a look at the implementation of WLang's ones, it's pretty simple to get started! # Tilt integration WLang has built-in support for [Tilt](https://github.com/rtomayko/tilt) facade to templating engines. In order to use that API: ```ruby require 'tilt' # needed in your bundle, not a wlang dependency require 'wlang' # loads Tilt support provided Tilt has already been required template = Tilt.new("path/to/a/template.wlang") # suppose 'Hello ${who}!' template.render(:who => "world") # => Hello world! template = Tilt.new("path/to/a/template.wlang", :dialect => Highlighter) template.render(:who => "world") # => Hello WORLD! ``` Please note that you should require tilt first, then wlang. Otherwise, you'll have to require `wlang/tilt` explicitely. # Sinatra integration WLang comes bundled with built-in support for [Sinatra](https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra). As usual in Sinatra, you can simply invoke wlang as follows: get '/' do wlang :index, :locals => { ... } end As wlang encourages logic-less templates, you should always use locals. However, there is specific support for layouts and partials, as the following example demonstrates: get '/' do wlang :index, :locals => {:who => "world"} end __END__ @@layout >{yield} @@index Hello from a partial: >{partial} @@partial yeah, a partial saying hello to '${who}'! Returned body will be (ignoring carriage returns): Hello from a partial: yeah, a partial saying hello to 'world'!