# Stencil 0.1 Released **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [December 28, 2009, 11:10am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/stencil-0-1-released/180738 "2009-12-28T11:10:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2009, 11:10am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/stencil-0-1-released/180738/1 "2009-12-28T11:10:23Z")
Stencil version 0.1 has been released! Stencil is a templating library with a number of design goals. - Limited code in templates. This isn’t meant to embed ruby in anything - it allows for simple control structures, since that’s typically what you need in a template, but full access to the Ruby interpreter is just a tempatation into sin. (From a separation of concerns standpoint.) There’s a certain amount of code available in conditionals and interpolations, since otherwise they’re much harder to do… - Easy to extend. If you do need something extra from a template, not having it in the templating language is frustrating. It’s easy to add features to stencil, since they’re described in as well-designed classes. - Generic output. Not everything is a website or a mime-encoded email. It’s nice to be able to spit out generic text from time to time. - Data sourced from simple datatypes - hashes and array, referenced with data paths. Views can be extracted from any object, or built up in code. Changes: Initial release Project: [http://rubyforge.org/project/stencil-templ/](http://rubyforge.org/project/stencil-templ/) Homepage: [http://stencil-templ.rubyforge.org/](http://stencil-templ.rubyforge.org/) ---
**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2009, 11:51am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/stencil-0-1-released/180738/2 "2009-12-28T11:51:44Z")
unknown wrote: > Stencil version 0.1 has been released! > > Stencil is a templating library with a number of design goals. Can you explain what advantages it has over mustache and liquid? Both are templating languages which don’t allow ruby code to be embedded directly and so are safe for untrusted users to write templates. Both are suitable for non-HTML uses (although mustache does do HTML entity escaping by default, I believe), and both are easily extended. Your home page doesn’t give any examples of how to use it, and the README just says: “This is a Really Cool Ruby Thing ( That deserves better documentation than this. )” So at the moment, I’d say you’re setting the barrier too high if you’re hoping to generate some interest. I am interested in templating languages in general, but I don’t want to have to reverse-engineer your project just to see whether it might be useful to me or not. Regards, Brian. ---
**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2009, 10:34am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/stencil-0-1-released/180738/3 "2009-12-29T10:34:06Z")
On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 2:51 AM, Brian C. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Your home page doesn’t give any examples of how to use it, and the > README just says: > > “This is a Really Cool Ruby Thing > ( That deserves better documentation than this. )” That’s since been updated. Apologies: the initial release announcement was a touch premature. As to the advantages over liquid and mustache, I can’t be exhaustive. Both seem to be targeted at HTML, even if they allow for arbitrary text output. Stencil is designed, quite frankly, with console output in mind. As such, this release doesn’t have HTML tag output or HTML escaping. Stencil is also strongly inspired by cs/template, and began because cs/template lacked a means to reference items above the current context (both cs/template and Stencil access data by means of paths into hash/array structures - inside of a loop, cs/template couldn’t refer to items higher up in the path) Stencil also includes functionality to extract data into the hash/array structure the templates require, and RSpec matchers for quickly confirming that the intermediary form has the appropriate structure. Hopefully that gives you some better idea if Stencil will suit your needs. Judson ---
**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2009, 6:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/stencil-0-1-released/180738/4 "2009-12-29T18:36:01Z")
Judson L. wrote: > As to the advantages over liquid and mustache, I can’t be exhaustive. > Both > seem to be targeted at HTML, even if they allow for arbitrary text > output. I have been using liquid for plain text output (generating router config files) without anything HTML-like getting in the way. Anyway, thanks for updating the readme and giving the background info I was looking for. Cheers, Brian.