Lilu Templating Language

Published 27 June 07 by Justin French, 5 comments

Wow. Of all the template languages I’m seeing pop up for Ruby or Rails, Lilu is by far the biggest shift in thinking.

You define your templates as real, valid HTML ‘mockup’ that can be viewed, validated and used independently of your application (say, by your hard-core HTML/CSS guru that can’t stand fiddling around with Erb), then Lilu kicks in and replaces portions of the HTML as part of the rendering process.

It’s a really interesting separation of design and logic, if that’s what you’re after. Your HTML geek sticks to HTML, your programming geek can then apply the business logic and real content to the HTML with Ruby.

Quick example from the wiki:

 update('#username').with(@user.login) if logged_in?

There’s also some slides from Yurii Rashkovskii’s presentation.

Thank you Yurri, and thank you Johan for the heads-up. I’m definitely going to have a play with this!