Ax Tags¶ ↑

A flexible, extensible custom tag and template-parsing framework built around the Radius templating framework. A lighter-weight alternative to systems like Liquid with XML-style input and output.

With AxTags, you create a library of available tags, define their functionality against your application (standalone, rails, sinatra, or any other) and begin parsing documents containing your custom markup with ease.

Get up and running fast:

gem install axtags

Hook up your Gemfile powered applications:

gem "axtags"

Getting going with AxTags involves creating a library of tags and then passing documents containing your tags through the parse method.

Your custom TagLibrary class provides the direct interface for both defining tags, passing local variables to the parser, and managing the parsing process. To get started, simply create your library as a descendant of the TagLibrary class:

class MyTagLibrary < AxTags::TagLibrary
  tag "myanchor" do |t|
    %{<a href="http://awesometown.com/">I am Awesome!</a>}
  end
end

You can see from the example, above, that we’ve created a tag myanchor which expands to an HTML anchor tag with a link to awesometown.com. You can see how this works by attempting to parse a document containing your new tag:

MyTagLibrary.parse("Here is an awesome link: <ax:myanchor/>")
=> "Here is an awesome link: <a href=\"http://awesometown.com/\">I am awesome!</a>"

It’s possible to add tags at runtime, as well, by working with the Radius context directly. You can accomplish that like so:

MyTagLibrary.build_tags do |context|
  context.define_tag("foo") do |t|
    %{<span class="foo">Bar</span>}
  end
end

This example adds support for the “<ax:foo/>” tag, which would expand on parsing to “<span class="foo">Bar</span>”.

Tags can be nested, access XML-style attributes, and pass along scope and context to text nodes within tags.

Tags can provide looping or repetitive behavior, as well.

_Documentation still pending…_

Copyright © 2013 Awexome Labs, LLC