Performance of Markaby, XmlMarkup, Haml Haiku and Malline?

Rails
21

Joshua M. wrote:

Thanks for the hint, I forgot to check this one out… Seems quite OK,
but somehow I don’t like stuff like

self << _‘some output’; << br

(or whatever)… Doesn’t seem much more beautiful than normal ERB…

So I guess I’ll stick with ERB for a while… :wink:

I’m by no means an expert on Malline, but I don’t think you have to use
that style all too often. There are places where helpers generate
strings (like in Markaby) that you have to handle like that, but for the
most part it should be as straight forward as

_ ‘some output’
br
_ ‘some more output’
div.some_class do
p do
_ ‘Your content here’
end
end

If you haven’t yet, take a look at the comparison of the Beast views
(http://www.malline.org/beast). That should give you an indication of
it’s usability.

Peace,
Phillip

22

Joshua M. wrote:

So TextMate isn’t sufficiently smart? Anyway, I don’t see any way how a
text editor should be able know where a tag should end, when there’s no
end tag…

I don’t know about TextMate, but in the Emacs haml- and sass-modes, you
can set the region around a block of code and re-indent it.

Phillip K.

Malline is very similar to Markaby. I’ve been working with it the past
few days and have run into a couple of problems, but the developer is
very responsive. www.malline.org and there’s a Trac at dev.malline.org.

Huh, I wasn’t aware of Malline. Looking at the code, though, it seems
like it would suffer from the same performance issues that Markaby does.

Tim U.:

The thing is that my smart editors (eclipse, jedit, netbeans etc) know
how to automatically indent HTML and XML. If I move a div from one
section to another I just the magical key combination and voila!

Sure, but you can do the same thing with Haml (see above).

Anyway here is a feature request.

I would appreciate some sort of an option to use blocks so I don’t
have to use indents. Whether it’s do end or {} I don’ t care. After
all if I liked significant indents I would be using python :slight_smile:

Just practically speaking, I don’t think this is going to happen any
time soon. It would require major, difficult overhauls to the entire
structure of the parser. We’d have to find a syntax that wouldn’t be
ambiguous with Ruby code or filters and would be unlikely to break lots
of existing code. We’d have to figure out how to implement it without
trying to parse the Ruby code, without losing line-number information,
and without making the parser entirely unmaintainable.

And even beyond the technical issues, it runs pretty strongly contrary
to the Haml philosophy to add in extra verbosity for no gain in power.
The first draft of Haml was designed by removing everything redundant
from an XHTML document. This included end tags, because the indentation
was already there, doing a perfectly good job of showing the structure.
I honestly can’t imagine when your indentation wouldn’t match up with
the structure of your document. I mean, sure, with Haml you can’t do

foo

bar

baz

but why would you ever want to?

23

Nathan Weizenbaum wrote:

Huh, I wasn’t aware of Malline. Looking at the code, though, it seems
like it would suffer from the same performance issues that Markaby does.

It probably does. It’s another one of those balancing acts that
developers have to make. I choose ease of development for the price of
a performance hit. Other’s don’t. Of course, one person’s ease is
another person’s pain.

Just practically speaking, I don’t think this is going to happen any
time soon. It would require major, difficult overhauls to the entire

That’s understandable.

I honestly can’t imagine when your indentation wouldn’t match up with
the structure of your document. I mean, sure, with Haml you can’t do

For me, it’s not that I don’t have structured indentation, it’s that I
don’t like to use 2 spaces. I have never liked space indentation (and
probably never will). I prefer to use a 4 character tab. My code is
generally very well structured in terms of indentation, but with tabs.
If Haml would support tabs, that’s all I’d need.

Peace,
Phillip

24

Phillip K. wrote:

It probably does. It’s another one of those balancing acts that
developers have to make. I choose ease of development for the price of
a performance hit. Other’s don’t. Of course, one person’s ease is
another person’s pain.

I certainly understand that tradeoff. All the early adopters of Haml had
to deal with it, until we started supporting precompilation.

For me, it’s not that I don’t have structured indentation, it’s that I
don’t like to use 2 spaces. I have never liked space indentation (and
probably never will). I prefer to use a 4 character tab. My code is
generally very well structured in terms of indentation, but with tabs.
If Haml would support tabs, that’s all I’d need.

Haml will begin to be more lenient with respect to what sorts of
indentation are allowed after version 2.0.

25

The thing is that my smart editors (eclipse, jedit, netbeans etc)
know
how to automatically indent HTML and XML. If I move a div from one
section to another I just the magical key combination and voila!

I’ve been using Haml and TextMate since Hampton sent his first email
about Haml. Works like a charm. I’m not too allergic to pressing the
backspace key. Haml auto-closes tags, so the “magic” autocompleting is
less of an issue.

Granted, almost all the Rails snippets are predicated on your using
erb or rhtml. If that’s a priority, then Haml might not be for you. If
clear code that mirrors the DOM is a priority, then take a second
look. Magic keys are often created to auto-type noise characters that
Haml doesn’t require.

Just my $.02

26

Nathan Weizenbaum wrote:

I don’t know about TextMate, but in the Emacs haml- and sass-modes, you
can set the region around a block of code and re-indent it.

in TextMate, hold down the option key to make multi-line edits. a HAML
example would be adding one level of indent to a region of code. hold
down the option key with your cursor immediately to the left of the
first character in the region you want to indent. and select down to
the last line of the region. than you can press tab to insert spaces in
front of each line.

27

Joshua M. wrote:

Dave Vanderkloot wrote:

Nathan Weizenbaum wrote:

I don’t know about TextMate, but in the Emacs haml- and sass-modes, you
can set the region around a block of code and re-indent it.

in TextMate, hold down the option key to make multi-line edits. a HAML
example would be adding one level of indent to a region of code. hold
down the option key with your cursor immediately to the left of the
first character in the region you want to indent. and select down to
the last line of the region. than you can press tab to insert spaces in
front of each line.

Or just select all needed lines and press Cmd-Alt-6 (or 5) to indent
your stuff… :slight_smile:

hmm - that isn’t working for me - is that standard TextMate behavior or
part of a bundle?

28

Dave Vanderkloot wrote:

Nathan Weizenbaum wrote:

I don’t know about TextMate, but in the Emacs haml- and sass-modes, you
can set the region around a block of code and re-indent it.

in TextMate, hold down the option key to make multi-line edits. a HAML
example would be adding one level of indent to a region of code. hold
down the option key with your cursor immediately to the left of the
first character in the region you want to indent. and select down to
the last line of the region. than you can press tab to insert spaces in
front of each line.

Or just select all needed lines and press Cmd-Alt-6 (or 5) to indent
your stuff… :slight_smile:

29

Dave Vanderkloot wrote:

hmm - that isn’t working for me - is that standard TextMate behavior or
part of a bundle?

Should be standard. And you also can intent using alt-tab or
alt-shift-tab. Anyway, I’d find it more natural if one could only press
the tab button.

30

Joshua M. wrote:

Dave Vanderkloot wrote:

hmm - that isn’t working for me - is that standard TextMate behavior or
part of a bundle?

Should be standard. And you also can intent using alt-tab or
alt-shift-tab. Anyway, I’d find it more natural if one could only press
the tab button.

thanks - the alt-tab combo is much better than what i was doing!

31

Thanks from me, too! All this time using TextMate and I’ve been doing
CMD-] and CMD-[.

Oh, THAT was the problem! On my swiss german keyboard alt-5 and alt-6
result in [ and ], so sorry for that, Dave. :wink:

For some reason I got used to use Cmd-[ and Cmd-] and don’t really use
Alt-Tab…

Anyway, I suggest you all read “TextMate - Power Editing for the Mac” by
James Edward G., there’s a lot of great information about how to
improve your daily usage of TextMate. :slight_smile:

32

Should be standard. And you also can intent using alt-tab or
alt-shift-tab. Anyway, I’d find it more natural if one could only press
the tab button.

thanks - the alt-tab combo is much better than what i was doing!

Thanks from me, too! All this time using TextMate and I’ve been doing
CMD-] and CMD-[.

sigh

Peace,
Phillip