Tag Archives: haml

Ruby, Web Applications

Haml, Sinatra and template variables

Haml advertises itself as offering a haiku for HTML; that might mean it is short, beautiful and expressive or it could mean it is enigmatic, unsatisfying and cryptic. After a period away I have forgotten how Ruby-centric Haml is. If you want to include parameters in a Haml template within Sinatra you need to bind a map to the parameter locals.

haml :index, :locals => {:hello => “World”}

The easiest way to then include the data within a tag seems to be to use Ruby string interpolation

%p= “Hello #{locals[:hello]}”

There may be more elegant ways to do this but it seems relatively idiomatic. It is just hard to adjust to after months working on very restrictive templating systems.

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Ruby, Web Applications

Haml: Round Deux

So, with a comment on an earlier post about Haml, saying that it had had a major update I decided to give it another go. This time in conjunction with the web framework Ramaze.

While Haml has definitely improved but there was a definite sensation of returning to an abusive relationship. Haml is very cool but it can also be a colossol bitch to use. Mostly because of its whitespace lovin’ ways. Care to punt as to what the root cause of this issue was:

Illegal nesting: content can’t be both given on the same line as %form and nested within it.

I’d put a space character between my attribute curly braces and the form tag declaration:

%form {:action => 'url'}

when I should have put:

%form{:action => 'url'}

Do I really need this level grief just to avoid writing closing tags?

Haml does, as its advocates say, bring a clean and clear syntax to the table but it also brings a bundle of its own issues along the way. Particularly time consuming is having to adjust indents when placing content at different layers. The strict two spaces rule means you have to adjust blocks and even if you set up your browser to do soft tabs at two spaces (just for one syntax) it is still easier to play around with markup than Haml.

One feature I did like a lot since last time is that variable interpolation is a lot easier now:

%p== My variable goes #{@here}

Inline tags are still hopeless but that’s true of mostly of the lightweight templating systems.

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Programming, Ruby, Scripting, Web Applications

Sinatra and Haml

On Monday I was meant to be learning how to use the Grails framework (following up the impressive Grails site that Sky has launched) but I instead got distracted into scratching another itch, using Sinatra with JRuby. Since I was doing a little REST application I thought I would also give Haml a go as it promised a far easier way of generating HTML responses.

Installing both Gems was easy as ever and Sinatra was really easy to understand conceptually. Put the HTTP method name, the URI pattern you want to match and then the return value of the block is what goes back to the client in the response.

So for example to map “/hello” to the plain text response “Hello World” you simply have.

get "/hello" do
  "Hello World"
end

Fire up the script (with necessary requires) and a HTTP server is set up and running. It really couldn’t be simpler. You can use a :symbol in the URI matcher and then access it through the params hash. Within half an hour I was starting to add resources into my served HTML and I felt like master of the REST UNIVERSE.

Sinatra is a really smart piece of code that makes it simple to write a basic web application. I have loads of ideas of how it could be useful but one of my first thoughts was that it actually does a good job of solving the issue of GUI platforms.

My next project is to see how it works with posting data back to the app but on the face of it it all seems straight-forward.

Haml is another story. It is undoubtedly a good idea and on the right track. A DSL for creating HTML the method html for example creates a block html tag  while p “Hello World” creates a paragraph tag with the parameter as the content. Hash parameters sent to the method become attributes of the class.

It is much quicker than generating the HTML by hand but often not by much. That is because Haml has not found the same easy metaphor for code and content that Sinatra has. It is very picky, constantly harping about two-space indentation (no more, no less, don’t dare use tabs you bastardo!) for example, it sometimes throws a stack trace that failed to make it to Sinatra leading to a blank screen on the browser and hunt into the console for a clue as to what has gone wrong.

The documentation is to poor to figure out why the library doesn’t accept what you are doing and I am still baffled as to whether the module handles inline tags or whether you are meant to devolve all of that to Textile. Passing parameters to Haml templates seems unnecessarily complex (the only way I could get it to work is with normal string interpolation, it’s a solution but it seems to break the DSL concept) and mixing inline formatting with parameters baffles me still.

Haml makes more sense to me than RHTML style templating but its claim to simplicity and enjoyment seems to come only with a deep understanding and long experience with using it. It took me 20 minutes to fall in love with Sinatra but it took 20 minutes for me to get a working Haml page. And I didn’t enjoy myself doing it.

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