ivankocienski/html-views

A library to give you nifty html views inside common lisp

html views

A HTML templating DSL and management system.

Motivation

I wanted to build a view system that could be used by lightweight web frameworks that would be more powerful and less burdensome than ad-hoc methods or calling out to a text file based template engine.

Features

• HTML DSL
• layout system (common site containing code goes here)
• nested views (views can render sub views)
• variables can be passed into views as needed
• HTML5 tags

Installation

Unfortunatly html-views is not yet in QuickLisp so you have to git clone this repo into your ${QUICKLISP}/local-projects directory and then just (ql:quickload :cl-html-views) or add cl-html-views to your system definitions.

Basic usage

See the examples folder for a walkthrough.

How it works

Basically the method defview is a macro that generates a bunch of macros that turn your code into a bunch of princ statements. It uses only one stream so it should be fast. This code is then wrapped in a lambda and handed to a hash table. Render then calls up these methods, passing them a stream and presto- sexp to string conversion with view nesting and what not.

Disclaimer

I am not by any stretch a lisp expert. I have been hacking lisp in my spare time for less than a year. This code works as well as I have tested it but I have not put it through any real work (I wrote this so I could do real work in lisp). So the techniques employed may make your stomach turn if you look too closely.

Future features

• view caching. render complex sub views once.
• some logic so if you invoke a tag with no arguments you can skip the extra 'nil'.
• pretty printing the html output for easier debugging
• more complex example code such as pulling things out of a DB.
• ability to render to a provided stream rather than just text

License stuff

By me (Ivan Kocienski) in 2015. Released under the MIT License.