philiKON – a journal

If you’re a Python web developer and are interested in fast templating, Chameleon might be of interest to you. Brought to you by that crazy Austro-Danish duo Malthe Borch and Daniel Nouri, it’s a byte compiler that bakes HTML/XML templates into Python (byte) code. Currently it has support for Zope Page Templates and Genshi. And it’s fast. Fricken fast. If I remember correctly, it doesn’t achive the same speeds as Google’s Spitfire in all benchmarks, but it’s in the same league.

Now Malthe and Daniel as well as some regular contributors such as Chris McDonough, Wichert Akkerman and Hanno Schlichting are perfecting ZPT and Genshi compatibility. With support for macros and i18n, it already looks like a serious contender to replace zope.pagetemplate in templating-heavy Zope apps such as Plone. In fact, Chameleon might be the perfect match for Alex Limi’s proclaimed faster and lighter Plone 4, next to ditching Archetypes, reducing the Component Architecture overdose and going more Pythonic.

That said, it’d be very interesting to see Chameleon being tried by the non-Zope crowd. repoze.bfg has already adopted it as its de-facto standard templating engine. Has anyone tried it with Django, Pylons, TurboGears yet?