A random entry from mwh's blog

Fri Sep 03 2004 16:37 CET-1CEST Nevow vs ZPT/TAL:

I've played a bit with Zope's Page Template and TAL system for generating HTML, and quite like them.

The rest of Zope is a bit large and scary, though, so for my latest time wasting project, I've been using Nevow and Twisted (another reason for this is that this project is an overgrown IRC bot :-).

Nevow templates look a bit like (and are somewhat inspired by) ZPTs, but at least on some levels, they are really quite different. The process of instantiating a ZPT is more or less like evaluating a function (i.e. side-effect free process):

ZPT x Data ----> output

With Nevow it's a bit different; a stan DOM is built out of your template and then mutated into the output.

I didn't appreciate this difference at first, but once I did found Nevow a fair bit less baffling.

I still think I prefer ZPT/TAL in some ways, but that might just be familarity. Also, Nevow is flexible enough that I can probably steal the features of TAL I like.

Thanks to dialtone on #twisted.web IRC for setting me straight!