Hooked on Myghty

I've been programming web sites for many years, and have yet to come across a templating language as appealing as Mason / Myghty. To avoid confusion I'm going to talk about Myghty, but since its a direct port of Mason (plus some MVC stuff) all of my comments apply to Mason as well (unless otherwise noted). So if you find yourself stuck using Perl (or you prefer Perl) and something here sounds appealing, by all means use Mason as I did.

Despite Myghty only having come into existence approximately 14 months ago, the code-base is stable, very quick, and has been running in production environments for over 8 months. This is mainly because it started as a very direct port of Mason to Python, it then grew a few additional features that made it great for MVC use. The methodologies present in Mason (thus Myghty as well) are known to scale to very large and complex sites, as this list of Mason-powered sites shows. But it's the little things added up that really make Myghty my template language of choice.

This is a rather lengthy post as I highlight and explain some core concepts of Myghty, please bear with me… also, if you'd like to follow along and try the examples out, its really easy to get started using Myghty with Paste.

Syntax

Template languages vary a lot in style, there are the very basic string replacement template languages all the way to more advanced template languages. Myghty definitely weighs in on the latter as it has many of its own concepts with regards to templating that produce a very robust and advanced templating system.

The syntax itself is also very appealing to me, as I'm a fan of templating languages that keep their guts inside < > signs. The only exception to this being if you need a quick line of Python, which is done just by having a % in front of it. Here's what a loop would look like:

% for person in people:
   <b>Hi</b><% person %>
% #end

You'll notice an additional line is needed to indicate the end of the loop. This is because Python uses white-space to determine blocks and Myghty needs to know when the indentation is over.

Components and Inheritance

In Myghty, each template is more properly referred to as a Component. When a component is directly called as a request (or sub-request), inheritance is applied. This is how a site's skin is typically applied. Rather than having to specify in your template that it includes or extends some other template, in Myghty your component automatically inherits from an autohandler file above it.

An easier way to think of it is to consider your template directory layout as a Class, and all the templates in it are methods. Every directory inside that root one is another Class, and so on. The autohandler in this context acts much like your __init__ method. Here's a little example:

/autohandler
Sitename% m.call_next()