To your point, too much code in view templates typically foreshadows various violations of OO.

Thanks for your comment. I had a feeling someone would call me on this.

Here’s how I feel about it — The idea of a server-side markup format that designers and coders will both be able to understand is a pipe dream. It has never truly been what good templating was about. It’s just a sales pitch for tool vendors and on real-world projects it never works out that way.

The closer your templates can be to the markup they spit out (obviously with duplication removed), though, the better. It makes your job as a coder easier.

I agree with you, if you do ERB the way you propose, I doubt you’ll have any problems. But if that’s all that you’re using code in your templates for, isn’t there a more succinct (and less dangerous) way of getting that done? Your templates are views and not application code. When people have code at their fingertips in views, they tend to do crazy things with it. It flies in the face of “separation of concerns” and MVC in general. HAML/SASS looks like a decent way to do that. I like the Unified EL that has been up and coming in frameworks like Seam, because they give you a way to consistently traverse collections throughout all layers of your code (in templates, logging statements, in configuration code, in injection code, etc.)

My reservations about code in templates are for those people that still pervasively use it in spite of other more expressive and less cryptic ways of doing things. Code in templates in the hands of someone that doesn’t have a good idea of how templating works turns all of your view code into tag soup. And my experience has been that happens *a lot* and I’ve just grown tired of cleaning up the messes.

What do you think? Thanks again for your comments.

thanks for your impressions.
I want to hook into ‘HAML and SASS’.
After 6 years of Java I’m mainly developing in ruby these days. When doing a webapp, I alway choose Erb.
Im my templates the code is checking whether the
collection to display is filled or not and if so loop over it.
I wouldn’t call that tag soup !
All the designers I’m working with can cope with the bit of ruby code within the templates.
When I did jsps I was loosing so much time with tags which did not fullfill me needs. The reuse of self created tags was not as frequent as I thought it would.
Later I was using velocity and freemarker as template language. That’s code in templates isn’t it ?!
From this perspective a bit of ruby in my views really doesn’t bother me. But I started to hate the concept of tags. I was evaluating Grails around christmas and a real showstopper for me was it’s view technologie.
I’m doing webdevelopment since 1997 and a lot of template engines / languages / technolgies came along.
My experience is that at the end of the day all these abstractions don’t pay off.