I don't know about scripting languages for the templating, it might be an overkill.
When I was picking lower language for MediaWiki Widgets extension, I looked at popular PHP templating systems and ended up picking Smarty ( http://smarty.net/) - it can be security locked, it has a few useful features. You can see Widget code here: http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/w/index.php?title=Widget:Google_Calendar&action=editand widget is called using a parser function like this: {{widget: Name|param=val|param2=val2}}. Double curlys are far from perfect, but there are not that many good alternatives - XML is probably the only good alternative because it's universal and use by many-many tools out there. Can't say that I'm an expert in templating languages though, especially when we're talking about power-users and not developers. Thank you, Sergey -- Sergey Chernyshev http://www.sergeychernyshev.com/ On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Brion Vibber <[email protected]> wrote: > As many folks have noted, our current templating system works ok for > simple things, but doesn't scale well -- even moderately complex > conditionals or text-munging will quickly turn your template source into > what appears to be line noise. > > And we all thought Perl was bad! ;) > > There's been talk of Lua as an embedded templating language for a while, > and there's even an extension implementation. > > One advantage of Lua over other languages is that its implementation is > optimized for use as an embedded language, and it looks kind of pretty. > > An _inherent_ disadvantage is that it's a fairly rarely-used language, > so still requires special learning on potential template programmers' part. > > An _implementation_ disadvantage is that it currently is dependent on an > external Lua binary installation -- something that probably won't be > present on third-party installs, meaning Lua templates couldn't be > easily copied to non-Wikimedia wikis. > > > There are perhaps three primary alternative contenders that don't > involve making up our own scripting language (something I'd dearly like > to avoid): > > * PHP > > Advantage: Lots of webbish people have some experience with PHP or can > easily find references. > > Advantage: we're pretty much guaranteed to have a PHP interpreter > available. :) > > Disadvantage: PHP is difficult to lock down for secure execution. > > > * JavaScript > > Advantage: Even more folks have been exposed to JavaScript programming, > including Wikipedia power-users. > > Disadvantage: Server-side interpreter not guaranteed to be present. Like > Lua, would either restrict our portability or would require an > interpreter reimplementation. :P > > > * Python > > Advantage: A Python interpreter will be present on most web servers, > though not necessarily all. (Windows-based servers especially.) > > Wash: Python is probably better known than Lua, but not as well as PHP > or JS. > > Disadvantage: Like PHP, Python is difficult to lock down securely. > > > Any thoughts? Does anybody happen to have a PHP implementation of a Lua > or JavaScript interpreter? ;) > > -- brion > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
