Hi,
I was wondering if anyone has thought about making rails’s templating
system more in the concepts of wicket (there are other such templating
engines, this is the one i’ve used). With wicket, the template is just
a regular HTML with attribute that identify snippets of HTML that need
to be dynamically created. Then, the backend code can substitute these
snippets, usually by reusing them, and injecting dynamic content. The
cool thing is that wicket templates contain no logic (nor loops or
conditions) and are valid HTML. So designers don’t need to think in
logic and can design (and maintain) the templates in their favorite
HTML editor. Also, wicket promotes the use of components, so, for
example, to have a date picker, you just put in your HTML the input
box for the date and a span for the calendar icon and in your code
create a date picker class and pass it the ids to these two items and
that’s it: the javascript is included, any necessary HTML is taken
care for you, etc.
We had good experience with wicket. Before, we used struts (yuck), and
our designer had a difficult time grasping logic ideas, and couldn’t
work with his editor. With wicket, the templates are very clean again,
and easy to understand (and beutiful).
So, as you may have realized by now is that I like wicket. But, I
don’t like Java so much any more.
Thanks,
Ittay
P.s., sorry if this issue has come up before, just point me to the
relevant thread if it has.