Rocket powered rollerskates templating with HTML::Zoom & Catalyst

Matt Trout has produced yet more Perl magic with a new templating system – HTML::Zoom. I’d accuse him of committing a cardinal sin, but I guess we can let him off seeing as it’s badass.

A templating engine isn’t much use unless we’ve got something to drive it – and what’s a more natural choice than Catalyst? As always, Catalyst makes gluing things together trivial – so I’ve adopted some prior art from t0m and released Catalyst::View::HTML::Zoom. Now, this is version 0.001 so it wouldn’t be complete without a big fat blinking disclaimer: we might have done this wrong. I chatted about it briefly in #catalyst before starting work, but I still could have got it wrong! So the API could change and everything might blow up in your face… but that’s the fun, right?

Anyway, here’s a brief look at how we’ve got it structured at the moment (shamelessly plagiarized from my own CPAN synopsis):

package MyApp::View::HTML;
use Moose;
extends 'Catalyst::View::HTML::Zoom';

package MyApp::Controller::Wobble;
use Moose; BEGIN { extends 'Catalyst::Controller' }
sub dance : Local {
    my ($self, $c) = @_;
    $c->stash( shaking => 'hips' );
}

package MyApp::View::HTML::Controller;
use Moose;
sub dance {
    my ($self, $stash) = @_;
    $_->select('#shake')->replace_content($stash->{shaking});
}

#root/wobble/dance
<p>Shake those <span id="shake" />!</p>

/wobble/dance => "<p>Shake those <span id="shake">hips!</span></p>";

The key class here is MyApp::View::HTML::Wobble which does the HTML::Zoom substitutions. $_ is locally aliased to the HTML::Zoom object for convenience and the first parameter is the stash object.

Happy hacking – let’s see where this ends up!