The Taming of the View

We know that testing is important; that separation of concerns is important; that modeling our domain is important; and that their are often many domains within an application. So why is it that most of the view engines make it so easy to break all these important activities?

View engines, such as erubis and ERB, make it so easy to break the model-view-controller-paradigm by allowing turing-complete code in the view. It is so easy to pull the database into the template by making calls such as <%= Order.find(:all, :conditions => { :status => 1 }) %>. Oh no! Now separation of concerns is thrown out the window, closely followed by testability and domain modeling.

Never fear - there is a better way! By following the teachings of String Template, we can introduce a strict enforcement of the model-view-controller-paradigm. In this session, we will highlight the problems with the existing engines, explore the possibilities of String Template and introduce Slippers - the ruby port of string template.