Webapps on App Engine, part 4: Templating

Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python, coding, app-engine, tech, framework

This is part of a series on writing a webapp framework for App Engine Python. For details, see the introductory post here.

In the first three posts of this series, we covered all the components of a bare bones webapp framework: routing, request/response encoding, and request handlers. Most people expect a lot more out of their web framework, however. Individual frameworks take different approaches to this, from the minimalist webapp framework, which provides the bare minimum plus some integration with other tools, to the all-inclusive django, to the 'best of breed' Pylons, which focuses on including and integrating the best libraries for each task, rather than writing their own.

For our framework, we're going to take an approach somewhere between webapp's and Pylons': While keeping our framework minimal and modular, we'll look at the best options to use for other components - specifically, templating and session handling. In this post, we'll discuss templating.

To anyone new to webapps, templates may seem somewhat unnecessary. We can simply generate the output direct from our code, right? Many CGI scripting languages used this approach, and the results are often messy. Sometimes, which page to be generated isn't clear until after a significant amount of processing has been done, and dealing with errors and other exceptional conditions likewise becomes problematic. Finally, this approach tends to lead to gobs of print statements cluttering up the code, making both the structure of the page and the flow of the code unclear.

Templating systems were designed to eliminate these issues. Instead of generating the page as we process the request, we wait until we're done, construct a dictionary of variables to pass to the template, and select and render the template we need. The templating system then takes care of interpreting the template, substituting in the variables we passed where necessary. Templating doesn't have to be complicated - here's a simple templating system:

def render_template(template, values): return template % values # Example template = """Hello, %(name)s! How are you this %(time_of_day)s?""" self.response.body = render_template(template, values)

This 'templating system' simply uses Python's string formatting functionality to generate its result. It quickly becomes apparrent that this isn't sufficient for templating web pages, though - we need more functionality. At a minimum, we need some form of flow control, so we can include sections of a page conditionally, such as login/logout links, and some form of looping construct, so we can include repeated sections, such as results from datastore queries. It helps if our templating system provides some features for template reuse, too, such as including other templates, or extending them.

How powerful should our templates be, though? This is a source of some disagreement. Some templating systems, like Django's, take a very minimalist approach, and contain only the bare minimum of functionality required to render templates. Any form of calculation - even things as simple as basic math and comparisons - should be done in code, with the results passed to the template. Other templating systems, like Mako, provide a much more full-featured templating language, and trust you not to abuse it.

Here's what sample templates look like in a few templating languages:

{% extends "base_generic.html" %} {% block title %}{{ section.title }}{% endblock %} {% block content %} <h1>{{ section.title }}</h1> {% for story in story_list %} <h2> <a href="{{ story.get_absolute_url }}"> {{ story.headline|upper }} </a> </h2> <p>{{ story.tease|truncatewords:"100" }}</p> {% endfor %} {% endblock %}

You're probably already familiar with Django's template syntax from previous posts. Because it's included with App Engine, it's often the easy default. As we've already mentioned, it's very restrictive about what you can do: It provides a few primitives, and relies on an extensible library of tags and filters (the bits after the | in {{...}}) to make it useful.

<%inherit file="base.html"/> <% rows = [[v for v in range(0,10)] for row in range(0,10)] %> <table> % for row in rows: ${makerow(row)} % endfor </table> <%def name="makerow(row)"> <tr> % for name in row: <td>${name}</td>\ % endfor </tr> </%def>

Mako is another popular templating engine, and takes the opposite approach to Django: Templates are created by inserting actual Python code, inside special processing directives of the form <% .. %>. It even goes so far as to permit and encourage defining functions inside templates! Mako works around Python's use of indentation for control flow by defining new keywords such as 'endfor'.

<html> <head><title>$title</title></head> <body> <table> #for $client in $clients <tr> <td>$client.surname, $client.firstname</td> <td><a href="mailto:$client.email">$client.email</a></td> </tr> #end for </table> </body> </html>

Cheetah is another templating system that takes the "we provide the gun, you point it at your foot" approach. It's similar to Mako in many ways, but doesn't require variable substitutions to be embedded in curly braces, and instead of using processing directives, it treats lines starting with a # as Python code. It also uses special directives such as 'end for' for nesting.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"> <html lang="en"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> {% block head %} <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" /> <title>{% block title %}{% endblock %} - My Webpage</title> {% endblock %} </head> <body> <div id="content">{% block content %}{% endblock %}</div> <div id="footer"> {% block footer %} © Copyright 2008 by <a href="http://domain.invalid/">you</a>. {% endblock %} </div> </body>

Jinja2 claims to have "Django-like syntax (but faster)". Notably, the syntactic elements for loops, control flow, etc, are a lot more Python-like, but they're still limited to what the language supports, and it still relies on specially defined tests, filters, etc.

<html> <body> <h1>${title}</h1> <table> <?py i = 0 ?> <?py for item in items: ?> <?py i += 1 ?> <?py color = i % 2 == 0 and '#FFCCCC' or '#CCCCFF' ?> <tr bgcolor="#{color}"> <td>#{i}</td> <td>${item}</td> </tr> <?py #endfor ?> </table> </body> </html>

Tenjin claims to be the fastest Python templating framework - and it has benchmarks (although not exhaustive ones) to back it up. It takes the general approach, with Python expressions and statements embedded directly into the markup. Notably, indentation of the Python statements maters, producing a somewhat confused mix of markup and Python code.

<table border="1"> <tr tal:repeat="row range(10)"> <td tal:repeat="column range(10)"> <span tal:define="x repeat.row.number; y repeat.column.number; z x * y" tal:replace="string:$x * $y = $z">1 * 1 = 1</span> </td> </tr> </table>

Chameleon is based on the Zope Page Templates specification, which takes an interesting approach. Chameleon templates are valid XML documents, unlike many templating engines, and it uses namespaces for attributes and tags to define the template behaviour. For example, the "tal:repeat" tag indicates that the tag it's on and all its children should be repeated for each value in the Python iterator passed as an argument. tal:replace replaces an element with the value of the expression, while other expressions permit setting attributes and replacing body content, and a 'meta' namespace handles operations such as including other templates.

Chameleon extends the Zope standard in several ways: expressions can be arbitrary Python expressions, and values can be substituted using a ${...} syntax in addition to the XML syntax, which avoids a lot of boilerplate in some situations. Chameleon templates are compiled to Python code on first use - so you're not doing XML DOM manipulation on every template generation. Chameleon recently got App Engine support when the author refactored out some code that relied on modules not available in App Engine.

I haven't mentioned all Python's templating systems here, by a long shot - this is merely a representative sample. For a more complete list, see this page.

Our framework

Examining the different templating engines leads to an interesting observation: Those templating engines that take the Django approach of "only what's necessary" tend to, of necessity, be a lot larger and more involved - and hence have a steeper learning curve - than those that allow you to leverage your Python knowledge in some fashion. For that reason and others, I'm not a big fan of them - I'd rather provide someone with a powerful but lightweight system, and trust them not to shoot themselves in the foot, than use a more complicated system designed to make foot-shooting an impossibility. With that consideration and others in mind, we'll look at what is required to use Chameleon in our framework.

Using Chameleon

Installation is straightforward: Download the tarball from the PyPi page, and copy the Chameleon-1.1.1/src/chameleon directory into a directory on the system path (eg, your app's root folder).

To use Chameleon, we first define a template loader:

from chameleon.zpt import loader template_path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "..", "templates") template_loader = loader.TemplateLoader(template_path, auto_reload=os.environ['SERVER_SOFTWARE'].startswith('Dev'))

Template loaders serve to cache loaded and compiled templates, which is essential for performance. As such, it makes sense to define our loader once at module level, and use it for all requests. To render a template, we fetch a template from the loader, then call it with keyword arguments corresponding to the parameters we want to pass to the template:

def TestHandler(RequestHandler): def get(self): template = template_loader.load("test.pt") self.response.body = template(name="test")

In terms of integrating templates into our framework, there's not a great deal we can do without locking users of our framework into using our preferred templating system. You can bundle the templating system with the framework, and even make it create a loader when it's first used. The approach you take depends on where you want to be on the flexibility / ease-of-use axis.

In the next post, we'll discuss session handling, the options available on App Engine, and how to integrate it into our framework.

Disqus