Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

Python Template Engine Comparison

written on Tuesday, January 1, 2008

I was small-talking with zzzeek about some things when I told him that I'm using Jinja, Genshi and Mako depending on what I'm doing. He told me that it's unusual to switch tools like that but I don't think it's that unusual.

All three template engines are totally different but have a one thing in common: All three are the "second generation" of template engines. Genshi is the formal successor of kid, Mako somewhat replaced Mygthy and Jinja was inspired by the django templates. All three of them are framework agnostic, use unicode internally and have a cool API you can use in WSGI applications without scratching your head. But what inspired those template engines and which template engine to choose for which situation?

I often used PHP in the past to do simple header/footer inclusion. But what always drove me nuts was that I had to use mod_rewrite to get nice URLs or use a bunch of folders with index.php files or use files and folders and drop the extension in the apache config. While this is nice, this is now that portable and you can't have dynamic parts in the URL and once you want some more dynamic stuff such as RSS feeds etc. you notice that you made a mistake by choosing PHP. Some days ago I then started working on the website for TextPress (not yet online) and wanted to try something new: I wrote a tiny WSGI application (about 50 lines of code) that just uses werkzeug's routing system and uses template names as endpoints. These templates are then loaded with Mako, rendered and returned as responses. This is not possible in the same way with Jinja because you don't have python blocks and not so simple and straightforward with Genshi because you have to think about XML or use a rather limited text based template engine. Another very cool feature of Mako is that you can do dynamic inheritance which is not possible in Jinja.

Mako is a great template engine if you know Python, if you need some logic in templates (and you know: logic in templates is not bad in every situation) and if you need the best performance. Without a doubt Mako is one of the fastest template engines for Python and the fastest template engine that does not use a C extension.

Then there is Jinja which is also a text based template engine like Mako. However the focus is on a completely different level. When Mako is like PHP, Jinja is like Smarty (even though Mako is a million times better than PHP as template engine). When I started working with Python as programming language for web applications I stumbled about django. I looked at the template engine and thought: WTF is that? The syntax seemed odd and the restrictions ridiculous. Later on I loved the syntax (and apparently others do to: the mini template engine by Ian Bicking (tempita if I recall correctly) and the Genshi text templates are using that syntax or a similar one too) but some of the restrictions seem still ridiculous. When I looked at all those Django templates I created over the time I noticed that I often moved calculations into template tags that could be function calls, that I did other calculations in the view functions that did not belong there and even more important: that you could replace 95% of the custom template tags with function calls or function calls with an enclosed template block if the template engine had proper expressions. This lead to the development of what is now known as Jinja. The syntax, the fact that it's sandboxed and the designed friendliness is still very similar to Django, but unlike Django, Python like expressions are possible in Jinja.

I'm using Jinja wherever I think web designers want to work on later on. For example as template engine for TextPress or other applications that should be styled by third party web designers.

Genshi on the other hand is an XML template engine. As a result of that it's slower but also "context aware". It knows when it's processing a CDATA section, it knows when it's inside a tag or an attribute etc. This makes it possible to defend XSS in an automatic way. Per default Genshi inserts the text into the output stream as text and not as markup. That means all the HTML entities are automatically escaped for you. And because it's stream based you can rewrite streams during the rendering process. This makes it possible to fill form fields automatically, use XInclude for simple layout templates and a lot more. You can even translate your XML based templates into HTML4 on the fly. So you can use your XML tool chain internally and output HTML4 and use the best of both worlds. But because of this high flexibility Genshi also has some problems to fight: You need to have XML knowledge to use it. No problem if you are a programmer, but not that good if you are a web designer doing fancy layouts. You are also forced to use XML templates everywhere. It's true that Genshi has text templates too to fill the gaps, but they are not comparable with real text template engines and you are still operating on an XML stream, just that you don't see it. And lastly: this whole stream processing makes Genshi slow. Not so slow that you can't use it for big applications, but noticeably slower than Mako or Jinja.

If you are using XML anyways in your application, Genshi is a very good idea. Also if you don't have template designers that don't know XML or if performance is not that much of a problem. Most of the time the bottleneck is the database anyways. I never had real problems with Genshi performance so far.

I hope this post sums up why I'm using all three template engines and why I think we should be happy that we can chose between a couple of template engines :-) Why I'm not covering other template engines like Cheetah or SimpleTAL? Mostly because I looked at them, tried them out and never used them for something big. Mostly because Mako looks a lot nicer than Cheetah to me and SimpleTAL is far too much away from Python for me.

This entry was tagged genshi, jinja, mako and python