Moulder in action

In a previous blog post, I’ve talked about templating in general and showed a quick example of how Moulder does templating.

Moulder is an Open source templating library that exists in 2 versions: Scala and Java. Both versions are hosted on Github and are available under the MIT Licence.

Unlike many other templating libraries, Moulder keeps the template data and the templating rules in separate files. The template data can (only) be any XML-like format, including HTML.
The templating rules are written in Scala or in Java (depending on the version you choose) and mimics jQuery’s usage patterns, i.e. a rule is expressed as a CSS selector and a list of operations to perform on the elements returned by that selector.

Introducing Immanix: a Java library to process XML using parser combinators

Processing XML files is a PITA. There. I said it. Processing XML files using the Java standard XML API, i.e. JAXP is even worse. There are some nicer APIs out there that alleviate this pain, like XPATH, XStream, JAXB, Castor, etc.

But still, they all fail in some point or another, ranging from being verbose and tedious to write to not being able to handle large XML streams.
The latter is a killer for many of the higher level approaches out there. Try using XPATH or any mapping library on a file weighing more than a couple of megabytes.

To handle such cases, we are usually left with StAX. Don’t get me wrong: StAX is not that bad an API, and I’d take it any day instead of JAXP even for small files. It still is a very low level API and parsing the simplest of files requires an impressive amount of code. Also, handling state with StAX is a painful exercice. You usually end up building a full-fledged state machine to do it.

It’s in dealing with such cases that I thought that there must be a better way to do this. And that’s how immanix was born.

On templating, and a shameless plug of Moulder

Moulder is a server-side templating system. It uses jQuery’s approach, i.e. select and transform, and works only on XML-like data. I’ve written it two times over: One time in Java and another in Scala. Both versions are available as Open source software on GitHub and released under the MIT License.

1. What is templating

Templating is generally used in (but not limited to) web applications to generate dynamic web pages. Every time you perform a search on Google or open your Facebook page, templating was used behind the scene to generate these pages.