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Posts tagged with “proton”

Changes are afoot

Monday, 25 May, 2009

If you’re a regular visitor, you may have noticed my rather ill-fated attempt (IMO) at using a magazine style theme on this site has now been replaced by… well… very little theme at all.

This is not the only change. After much internal cogitation, I’ve decided to dump the forum, and use Google Groups for further discussion on all my projects. Along with moving the hosting of those projects elsewhere. In short, this blog now becomes more of a blog. The distinction makes sense in my head anyway.

While the old forum messages can still be found here: http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/forum, check below for where you should submit comments from now on.

YAK for WordPress
The main project page will now be at WordPress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yak-for-wordpress/.
General discussion will now be held at: http://groups.google.com/group/yak-discuss.
Bug reports can be posted to: http://groups.google.com/group/yak-bugs.

stomp.py
The main project page is at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/stomppy/.
The discussion group can be found here: http://groups.google.com/group/stomppy.

Proton Template Engine
The project page is at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/proton-te/.

Snake Wrangling for Kids
The project page is still here: http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/writing/snake-wrangling-for-kids/.
The discussion group is here: http://groups.google.com/group/swfk

More to come…

Tags: proton, stomp, swfk, yak
Category: miscellaneous
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Template Engine Performance (improvement)

Saturday, 18 April, 2009

My brilliant (well, in my opinion) idea for a Python templating engine, performed somewhat less than brilliantly compared to the competition.

Tenjin, marketed as the fastest template engine in the world, blitzes through 10,000 pages in 5.61 seconds on a Mac Intel CoreDuo 1.83GHz (according to their website). The same benchmark runs on my Mac in about 4.98 seconds, so adjusting the other Python templating engines listed on Tenjin’s website by the same ~11% we get approximate performance of:

pyTenjin (0.6.1)	4.98
Mako (0.1.9)	12.01
Myghty (1.1)	17.18
Cheetah (2.0)	17.64
Django (0.9.5)	53.22
Templetor (web.py 0.22)	54.76
Genshi (0.4.4)	241.80
Kid (0.9.6)	337.27

The original version of Proton, for the same benchmark, came in at a less than impressive 400+ seconds. A bit of tidying up reduced the current version to a more respectable (but still abysmal) 280 seconds, putting it between Genshi and Kid. A couple of other ideas produced even worse performance (more than 800 seconds), but in the meantime, lxml released a Python3 compatible version. A minor rewrite later, and the lxml version of Proton now runs the benchmark in a far more acceptable 78 seconds. Putting it between Templetor and Genshi. Still not even in the top three, but it has the advantage (again in my opinion) of being an entirely more elegant solution, and is now within throwing distance of both Templetor and Django.

Result!

Get the latest version of Proton from the Google code project. You will probably need to download and install the source dist of lxml to take advantage of the performance improvement.

Tags: proton, python, templating, xhtml, xml
Category: development, technical
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Introducing the Proton Template Engine (part 3)

Thursday, 29 January, 2009

Templates are usually made up of other templates, especially if you want to re-use page/document components. Proton supports an include function to embed one template inside another.

For example, a fragment of a template (include2.xhtml) containing 2 paragraphs of text…

<div>
    <p eid="para1">PARA 1 TEXT</p>
    <p eid="para2">PARA 2 TEXT</p>
</div>

…can be embedded in another template (include1.xhtml)…

<body>
    <h1 eid="title">PAGE TITLE GOES HERE</h1>

    <div eid="includedcontent">
    INCLUDED CONTENT GOES HERE
    </div>
</body>

…and then populated with data, using the following snippet of code:


tmp = self.templates['include1.xhtml']
tmp.setelement('title', 'Page Title')
tmp.include('includedcontent', 'include2.xhtml')
tmp.setelement('para1', 'First paragraph of text')
tmp.setelement('para2', 'Second paragraph of text')

On the ‘syntactic sugar front’, as an alternative to the more explicit repeat function (for repeating elements in the output), Proton supports setting lists of values rather than single-values. Consider the template:

<ul>
    <li rid="list-item" eid="list-item">LIST ITEMS</li>
</ul>

The list can be populated without having to explicitly call repeat, using the following code snippet:


lst = [ 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g' ]
tmp.setelement('list-item', lst)

If your objects are decorated with properties (@property), then Proton also supports automatically setting the values in the page, using the convention of id followed by colon followed by property. For example, using the following template:

<dl>
    <dt>X Value</dt>
    <dd eid="prop:x">prop x here</dd>
    <dt>Y Value</dt>
    <dd eid="prop:y">prop y here</dd>
</dl>

A class Temp, with properties x and y can be set in the template, with the name prop and the values will be automatically populated.


class Temp(object):
    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self._x = x
        self._y = y

    @property
    def x(self):
        return self._x

    @property
    def y(self):
        return self._y

t = Temp('100', '500')
tmp.setelement('prop', t)

Tags: java, proton, python, template, xhtml, xml
Category: development, internet, technical
Comments (0)

Introducing the Proton Template Engine (part 2)

Tuesday, 27 January, 2009

In a typical template engine, there will be some form of conditional logic, for changing the display of a section of a document. This will generally be an if-statement wrapping one or more elements, perhaps enabling or disabling sections based on access rights, showing more detail based on data, and so on.

Proton supports this logic with the facility to hide an element (marked with the eid attribute). For example, in this excerpt of a navigation menu:

<ul class="menu">
    <li eid="accounts"><a href="/accounts">Account Summary</a></li>
    <li eid="transactions"><a href="/transactions">View / Download Transactions</a></li>
    <li eid="transfer"><a href="/transfer">Transfer Funds</a></li>
    <li eid="bills"><a href="/bills">Bill Payments</a></li>
    <li eid="autopayments"><a href="/autopayments">Automatic Payments</a></li>
    <li eid="exchange"><a href="/exchange">Foreign Exchange</a></li>
</ul>

The following code will switch off the “transactions”, “autopayments” and “exchange” elements:


tmp.hide('autopayments')
tmp.hide('exchange')
tmp.hide('transactions')

Resulting in output of:

<ul class="menu">
    <li><a href="/accounts">Account Summary</a></li>
    <li><a href="/transfer">Transfer Funds</a></li>
    <li><a href="/bills">Bill Payments</a></li>
</ul>

You can see this example in action in the test hiding.py.

Another, less common but equally useful, feature of template engines is the facility to translate text (in other words, i18n or the internationalisation of output). Proton supports translation by setting a translation function on a template. For example, consider the following template:

<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Page Title</h1>

    <p id="para1">Some translated text</p>
    <p id="para2">Not translated text</p>
</body>
</html>

In this case, translation doesn’t rely on the 3 attributes (eid, aid, rid) — rather a default set of named (xhtml) elements are translated (the set can, of course, be overridden). The following code demonstrates translation in action:


fr = {
    'Page Title' : 'Titre de la page',
    'Some translated text' : 'Certains textes traduits'
}

def translate(text):
    if text in fr:
        return fr[text]
    else:
        return text

tmp = self.templates['tests/i18n.xhtml']
tmp.translate = translate

And the resulting output:

<html>
<head>
<title>Titre de la page</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Titre de la page</h1>

    <p id="para1">Certains textes traduits</p>
    <p id="para2">Not translated text</p>
</body>
</html>

Tags: proton, python, template, xhtml, xml
Category: development, internet, technical
Comments (0)

Introducing the Proton Template Engine

Tuesday, 20 January, 2009

I haven’t come across many (any?) templating engines for Python 3, so it seemed like a good idea to update my own attempt, and then release as an open source (LGPL) project.

Proton is a simple, “code-less” engine for xml/xhtml templates. Code-less, because it uses 3 types of ID (attribute) in a template file, rather than snippets of code — this moves the complexity out of the template and into the application (where I think it belongs).

The following template demonstrates basic use of the 3 IDs:

<html>
<head>
<title eid="title">PAGE TITLE</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1 eid="title">PAGE TITLE</h1>

    <p><a eid="link" aid="link" href="">LINK ITEM</a></p>

    <ul>
        <li rid="list-item" eid="list-item">LIST ITEMS</li>
    </ul>
</body>
</html>

The attribute “eid” is used to change the value of an element, or hide the element. “aid” is used to change the value of an attribute, and “rid” is used for repeating elements. This might seem a bit simplistic, but it covers the fundamentals of most templating tasks.

The following code demonstrates the use of the template:


tmp = Templates()['test.xhtml']

tmp.setelement('title', 'An Xhtml Page', '*')
tmp.setelement('link', 'This is a link to Google')
tmp.setattribute('link', 'href', 'http://www.google.com')

tmp.repeat('list-item', 5)
for x in range(0, 5):
    tmp.setelement('list-item', 'test%s' % x, x)

print(str(tmp))

I used an earlier version of Proton for my own (rather ill-fated) project; a web-based system for timesheet and invoice management, so it has been tested in some relatively complicated scenarios — however, I am keen to hear where it falls down. i.e. complex pages where using 3 attributes just doesn’t cut it.

Tags: proton, python, template, xhtml, xml
Category: development, internet, technical
Comments (4)

Posts tagged with “proton”

Changes are afoot

Template Engine Performance (improvement)

Introducing the Proton Template Engine (part 3)

Introducing the Proton Template Engine (part 2)

Introducing the Proton Template Engine

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