Cheetah

Dorothea asked about experiences with Cheetah. I am currently in the process of re-doing the templating mechanism in RESTLog, throwing out my hand made templating scheme and replacing it with Cheetah and it's been a great success. I initially learned of Cheetah from Sam Ruby as he is using to write his own blogging software. The transformations are fast and Cheetah, to me, has struck just the right balance, sticking to adding features needed for templating and avoiding the tempation to become a full-blown language on it's own, instead deferring to Python when appropriate.

The NameMapper functionality is very cool. NameMapper is how Cheetah maps names in Cheetah into names in Python. You want to get data into the template right? So you stuff all the data into variables of various types. How you get to that info in the template is handled by the NameMapper syntax. Here is a great example from the Cheetah documentation.

Cheetah definitely passes by first cut utility test, in adding Cheetah to RESTLog my code got smaller and cleaner. In fact, after adding in Cheetah and my XmlToDict.py my templating code is only a handful of lines long. The updated version of RESTLog, including Cheetah templating and support for comments, should be released by next weekend.