Hello Yuki, Here are my observations regarding Haml and Sass: 1. Very concise and readable code - Haml and Sass achieve it by following the natural hierarchy of the DOM model and actually enforce it by requiring two spaces for indenting contained entities within the containers. Mind you, I am not a Python programmer so initially I hesitated to try Haml, but having gone through this little exercise, I can attest that it is not a problem in practice. On the contrary, it helps to be able to visualize the DOM tree at a glance. As I mentioned in my other post, Insoshi is very well written so it is much less of a problem to see the forest from the trees, but I have maintained and enhanced a large Ruby on Rails application where the earlier programmers have gotten rather enthusiastic and got carried away while coding the views in ERB. It was very painful to be able to just understand what they were doing much less debug and enhance it! I had to do a lot of refactoring in the worst cases by creating helper functions and calling them from the ERB code to reduce clutter. Since Haml eliminates the unnecessary "noise" of HTML tags, I feel more like typing in the code since it feels more like a coding language and less like a template language, precisely the strengths of ruby and RoR.
2. Speed - I haven't done any scientific benchmarking yet (have been rather busy), but I can see that the Haml code executes at least as fast if not faster than ERB. If someone in the group does it then would be a useful contribution. Haml is being improved at a very rapid rate by its current maintainers Nathan, Chris, and Mislav and they are very capable people. Actually, I translated Insoshi ERB views to Haml Views using version 2.0.6 and version 2.0.8 just came out! The future seems very bright for Haml and Sass thanks to the tireless work of individuals like Nathan,Chris, and Mislav. Now some of the things that prevent me from jumping head-first into Haml. Debugging is a problem for me at this point. I use NetBeans and one of the core strengths of NetBeans is its debugger. At times there is just no substitute for stepping through the ERB code and see what it is doing, examine the variables etc. Haml has no such support that I know of at the moment. Now, I am a command line programmer and have no trouble using non GUI tools but you need a basic set of techniques to be able to debug something when your back is against the wall. I have not found them yet mainly because I have not looked hard enough. The Haml group is one of the friendliest and knowledgable group of people and they literally pull you along, so I am sure that they will be of help here. On this issue, the ball is in my court since I haven't done the homework yet. Other than that, I think Insoshi should be continuously improved and the bar should be set higher and higher so that it maintains its status as one of the leading open source social networking platforms just as you are doing with your work on groups. These are just my thoughts, I may be wrong (have been before - unfortunately many times). Regards, Bharat --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Insoshi developer site: http://dogfood.insoshi.com/ Insoshi documentation: http://docs.insoshi.com/ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Insoshi" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/insoshi?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
