From: Andreas Schwarz <usenet@...>
Date: 2004-03-08T06:24:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Looking for HTML templating system

Kirk Haines <khaines@enigo.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Andreas Schwarz wrote:
> 
> > I am looking for a templating system for my forum
> > (http://rforum.rubyforge.org). I would prefer something lightweight
> > like PageTemplate over heavy XML stuff like Amrita, because the
> > forum will have to handle quite a lot of traffic and my server
> > doesn't have too much memory. But the reason why I can't use most of
> > the templating engines is that I want to make the forum
> > multi-language, so that I can't write:
> > 
> > [%if logged_in%]
> > Logged in as [%var username%]
> > [%endif%]
> > 
> > but would have to write something like
> > 
> > [%if logged_in%]
> > [%var text_logged_in_as(username)%]
> > [%endif%]
> > 
> > Does anyone know a templating system I could use?
> 
> Iowa might work.

Thanks, I'll have a look at it.

> How much traffic do you get, and what is your server's mem and CPU,
> out of curiosity?

At the moment I am using an extremely simple self-written PHP
forum which gets about 500-600k hits per month
(www.mikrocontroller.net/forum/). The typical loading time is < 0.2s,
and I dont't want it to increase. The server is a virtual(UML) server
from www.vd-server.de with 96MB RAM.

> In HTML file:
> 
> <if oid="logged_in?">
> @text_logged_in_as
> </if>
> 
> 
> 
> In code file:
> 
> def text_logged_in_as
>   # No idea how you are handling the multiple languages.
>   # The assumption here is that language choice is either stored
>   # in a cookie or derived from the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANG paramter,
>   # and that whichever way it's determined, we put the choice in a
>   # variable, @lang.  Also assuming, for this example, that there's
>   # a big hash that contains the text items.
> 
>   @site_text[@lang]['logged_in_as']
> end

I don't want to create a method for every string, and there is another
problem: the strings have to take "arguments" (the username, in this
case). I could use ERuby with a method like this:

def gettext(string, *args)
  @text[@lang] % args
end

where @text[@lang] is "Logged in as %s". But it looks a bit ugly to
have <%=gettext('LOGGED_IN_AS', @username)%> everywhere in the file...

Another idea I just got: writing TEXT_LOGGED_IN_AS(username) in the
template file and using a script to generate the different language
versions of the template.

> -----
> Another way would be to have more than one HTML file; one for each 
> language. 

I don't want to do that because it would mean writing a lot of
redundant code.

> This is how I'd probably do it, personally.  If you go to 
> http://enigo.com/demos/multi_lang/index.html
> there is a very quick, simple demo of this.  I'd been planning to do
> one, and your query gave me the impetus to do it.  If you look at that
> page with your langauge preference set to English, you'll see the
> content in English.  If you switch your preference to Spanish, you'll
> see it in Spanish.

I think I could use the accept-language setting to set the
language cookie and also add some small form field to allow the user to
change the language, because many browsers aren't configured correctly.

Andreas