Raison d'etre

The rationale for this blog is to compare and contrast the various HTML templating systems available for Python. There are already many different web frameworks available, and there has been a fair bit of attention on comparing and contrasting them them over the past several months. I expect that work to overlap my own in some areas, but I want to focus specifically on the template systems themselves, and consequently on the view portion of the MVC model.

To this end, I hope to come up with some more or less non-trivial tasks, focused specifically on the view problem domain, and try out some implementations in a bunch of different template systems. Rather than using any particular web framework, persistance model, or so on, I'll try to work up a fake-out back end and use it to feed data into the view.

I hope to focus mainly on template systems which are fairly agnostic about the web framework they are running in, although this may mean I could miss some of the template systems which are specific to certain environments (possibly newvow fits into this category?). I hope to eventually get to every "major" templating system, but given the generally poor state of web framework documentation, I'll focus on the general ones first.

One of my other motivations in writing this is to cast a little light on some of the template systems that might be missed by the more general web framework comparisons because they are not integrated into a particular framework.

Next up: a little bit about my own background and approach, a description of some of the tasks I'd like to tackle in this comparison, and a sketchy outline of what my fake back-end will resemble.

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Next: my background