Hamlet 6 to 7

January 28, 2011

By Michael Snoyman

I wanted to let everyone know that I've made some decisions about the future of Hamlet: basically, I've decided to bite the bullet and make a bunch of breaking changes at once to make Hamlet, Cassius and Julius more consistent and fit in better with Haskell syntax. I'm still unclear on some minor details, so I will hold off on a post explaining the changes until later.

However, I wanted to allay some fears: in case you are terrified at the thought of having to convert all of your templates, worry not! This version of Hamlet will include an executable called hamlet6to7 to automate the conversion. I've already used it on the Yesod codebase, and everything seems to be working out fine. Obviously, be smart when using this tool, and make sure you have your code backed up (ie, already committed) when you run it.

The program takes a list of files to modify, and writes out a new file in the same location. It modifies files with the file extensions hamlet, cassius, julius or hs. For the first three, everything is pretty straight forward. For Haskell source files, it makes modifications to quasi-quotation blocks. It looks for a few different things:

GHC 6.12 quasi-quotation ([$hamlet|...|])
GHC 7 quasi-quotation ([hamlet|...|])
CPP conditional code to select which version to run (#if GHC7...)
CPP definitions to switch between 6.12/7 ([HAMLET|...|])

This should work for most everybody; if you find any bugs, let me know.

Sample Hamlet

I'm actually quite happy with the new Hamlet syntax: I think it is much more readable and much closer to actual Haskell. Here is some sample code taken straight from Yesod:

!!!

<html>
    <head>
        <title>#{pageTitle p}
        ^{pageHead p}
    <body>
        $maybe msg <- mmsg
            <p .message>#{msg}
        ^{pageBody p}

Lucius

One change I specifically did not make was switching Cassius to following Less syntax. I do think this idea has merit, but instead of making a huge breaking change for Cassius, I've deicded to add a new template language, Lucius (name is up for debate btw), which will follow a different syntax. I can add this in for Hamlet 0.7.1, and if everyone likes it, perhapsCassius will get deprecated.

When's Yesod coming out?

I was actually hoping to have Yesod 0.7 available this week, but life got a little crazy. Also, very recently, I started working on rewriting some major pieces of Yesod's routing code. Previously, I had a huge mess of TH code, bending over backwards to accomodate the web-routes Site datatype, and a very weird split of code between Yesod and web-routes-quasi. I've made a few decisions:

web-routes is nice, but it doesn't fit Yesod properly.
Dispatching and parsing need to happen simultaneously. This is to allow general WAI applications to be directly embedded as subsites.
Wherever possible, combine the code for subsites and regular sites. I want to minimize the Template Haskell codebase as much as possible.

The impetus for this change was point number two: I believe we're going to be seeing more WAI-specific applications in the future, and one goal I've always had is great interoperability amonst Yesod web applications (that is the reason for the WAI after all).

In any event, this code is now written, and fairly well tested. There's a few datatype issues I need to figure out (does joinPath work on Strings of ByteStrings, for example), and I need to update the scaffolder for recent changes, and then we should be good to go.

With the new highly modularized breakdown of Yesod packages, we can easily release an update to smaller components like yesod-form later on. So for the moment, there have been no major improvements there, but they can be included in point releases instead of requiring a brand new major release. An example of such a change is migrating yesod-form to use digestive-functors in the future.

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