Airspeed - a Python template engine

What is Airspeed?

Airspeed is a powerful and easy-to-use templating engine for Python that aims for a high level of compatibility with the popular Velocity library for Java.

Selling points

• Compatible with Velocity templates
• Compatible with Python 2.7 and greater, including Jython
• Features include macros definitions, conditionals, sub-templates and much more
• Airspeed is already being put to serious use
• Comprehensive set of unit tests; the entire library was written test-first
• Reasonably fast
• A single Python module of a few kilobytes, and not the 500kb of Velocity
• Liberal licence (BSD-style)

Why another templating engine?

A number of excellent templating mechanisms already exist for Python, including Cheetah, which has a syntax similar to Airspeed.

However, in making Airspeed's syntax identical to that of Velocity, our goal is to allow Python programmers to prototype, replace or extend Java code that relies on Velocity.

A simple example:

t = airspeed.Template("""
Old people:
#foreach ($person in $people)
 #if($person.age > 70)
  $person.name
 #end
#end

Third person is $people[2].name
""")
people = [{'name': 'Bill', 'age': 100}, {'name': 'Bob', 'age': 90}, {'name': 'Mark', 'age': 25}]
print t.merge(locals())

You can also use "Loaders" to allow templates to include each other using the #include or #parse directives:

% cat /tmp/1.txt
Bingo!
% cat /tmp/2.txt
#parse ("2.txt")
% python
Python 2.4.4 (#1, May 28 2007, 00:47:43)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5367)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from airspeed import CachingFileLoader
>>> loader = CachingFileLoader("/tmp")
>>> template = loader.load_template("1.txt")
>>> template.merge({}, loader=loader)
'Bingo!\n'

How compatible is Airspeed with Velocity?

All Airspeed templates should work correctly with Velocity. The vast majority of Velocity templates will work correctly with Airspeed.

What does and doesn't work?

Airspeed currently implements a very significant subset of the Velocity functionality, including $variables, the #if, #foreach, #macro, #include and #parse directives, and "$interpolated #strings()". Templates are unicode-safe.

The output of templates in Airspeed is not yet 'whitespace compatible' with Velocity's rendering of the same templates, which generally does not matter for web applications.

Where do I get it?

https://github.com/purcell/airspeed

Getting started

The Velocity User Guide shows how to write templates. Our unit tests show how to use the templates from your code.

Reporting bugs

Please feel free to create tickets for bugs or desired features.

Who is to blame?

Airspeed was conceived by Chris Tarttelin, and implemented jointly in a test-driven manner by Steve Purcell and Chris Tarttelin. We can be contacted by e-mail by using our first names (at) pythonconsulting dot com.

Extensions for compatibility with Velocity 1.7 were kindly provided by Giannis Dzegoutanis, and further modernization has been done by David Black.

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