Ezamar

Ezamar is a light-weight and simple templating engine for Ruby.

The first versions date back to 2006 when Ramaze was created, but I extracted it from Ramaze to level the playfield for more competitve engines.

It is based on a number of so-called pipes that perform evaluation and substitution on a String.

• Simple implementation
• No dependencies
• Elements for easy encapsulation of partial functionality
• Template compilation
• (X)HTML compatible

Ezamar should work with any Ruby implementation that conforms to MRI versions since 1.8.4 and possibly earlier versions as well.

require 'ezamar'

string = 'The Answer is #{21 + 21}'
template = Ezamar::Template.new(string, :file => '<eval>')
template.result(binding)

Since Ezamar is based on Ruby String interpolation you can use any valid interpolation syntax inside your templates and it will be put into the result. There are 3 special instructions that will result in string substitutions during template compilation.

<?r rubycode ?>

Evaluates the code inside the tag, this is considered XHTML-valid and so is the preferred method for executing code inside your templates. The return-value is ignored.

#{ rubycode }

You know this from normal ruby already and it's actually nothing else. Interpolation at the position in the template, isn't any special taggy format and therefor safe to use.

<% rubycode %>

The same as <?r ?>, ERB-style and not valid XHTML, but should give someone who is already familiar with ERB some common ground

<%= rubycode %>

The result of this will be interpolated at the position in the template. Not valid XHTML either.

• Jonathan Buch

  Who is of the first users of Ezamar, found a ton of bugs and provided the RenderPartial pipeline.

• Zenix

  Who provided documentation.

• The folks in #ramaze on irc.freenode.net

  Who kept pushing Ezamar to new limits and contributed a lot.

• George Moschovitis a.k.a gmosx

  Who inspired the Ramaze project and Ezamar through his awesome work on the original Nitro framework.