Ash Ra Template

Expressive & customizable template system featuring Clojure language processing. The essence of ART (at 1.0) is:

• Clojure processing: A template processor that passes files through with Clojure processing of code blocks.
• Composable: Near-frictionless integration with it's public APIs and CLI.
• Customizable: Like Git, ART exposes 2 layers, plumbing (libraries of public APIs you can leverage to build your solutions) and porcelain (finished templating system that you can use in your code as well as a full CLI-based templating solution).
• Expressive: Unconstrained limit on expressing yourself. With no limited library to restrict your freedom. There is no library of functions like Selmer and other templating systems; you bring your own.
• High quality: Sufficient test coverage, near bullet-proof, satisfying ergonomics.

Tested with Clojure 1.10.0 and newer, and with Java 8 and newer LTS releases.

Components

ART library, the renderer proper. Includes detailed information about using the ART library and ART template syntax, rendering API and options, and processing.

ART CLI library aggregates code common to the interpretation and processing of ART build tool and command line arguments.

Clojure tool for rendering ART templates.

Leiningen plugin for rendering ART templates.

Quick Start

Include this library from Clojars by adding the latest version of net.vivid-inc/art to your project dependencies:

; Clojure tools deps.edn
{:deps {net.vivid-inc/art {:mvn/version "0.7.1"}}}

; Leiningen project.clj
:dependencies [[net.vivid-inc/art "0.7.1"]]

Render a template string:

(require '[vivid.art :as art])

(art/render "There were <(= (+ 1 2) )> swallows, dancing in the sky.")

Or, to render from a file:

(art/render (slurp "index.html.art"))

Use cases

• Automating the bulk generation of data files, such as SQL unit tests in data science, per-language I18n/M10n files.
• HTTP server templating engine, dynamic web content.
• Static website generation (SSG), including HTML pages, blog articles, navigation, layouts, headers and footers, templated SVG images.
• Templating source code files, for example to encode project meta-data as variables written in a source file.

Contributing

Pull Requests are welcome! We work with people offering PRs to revise and iterate leading to solutions in accord with project goals and release criteria. Development topics and product roadmap are maintained in DEVELOP.md. Commits must include Signed-off-by indicating acceptance of the Developer's Certificate of Origin. Unproductive behavior such as unkindness towards others and derailment is not tolerated.

Attributions

• Original implementation by Vivid Inc.
• Illustration by Ruxandra.

Of the Clojure templating libraries we examined, none seemed to assist in porting a non-trivial amount of ERB-templated content to a Clojure-based static site generation tool. We find the ability to in-line arbitrary Clojure code is intoxicatingly pragmatic (also expressed as: Enough rope to hang oneself). Seeking to wield such expressive power in a general-purpose templating system, we wrote Ash Ra Template, or ART.

License

© Copyright 2024 Vivid Inc. and/or its affiliates. Apache License 2.0 licensed.