Overview

Papercraft is a templating engine for dynamically producing HTML in Ruby apps. Papercraft templates are expressed as Ruby lambdas, leading to easier debugging, better protection against HTML injection attacks, and better code reuse.

Papercraft templates can be composed in a variety of ways, facilitating the usage of layout templates, and enabling a component-oriented approach to building web interfaces of arbitrary complexity.

In Papercraft, dynamic data is passed explicitly to the template as block/lambda arguments, making the data flow easy to follow and understand. Papercraft also lets developers create derivative templates using full or partial parameter application.

Why Papercraft?

Why should you write your HTML templates in Ruby? All of us know how to generate HTML with ERB, and ERB is pretty cool! But with Papercraft, you don’t need to do the constant mental switching between HTML syntax and Ruby syntax. As you’ll see there’s also no need to put each template in a separate file. You can organize your templates however you want. Papercraft also makes it very easy to compose templates. Creating layouts, partials and components is trivial:

-> {
  div {
    h1 "Hello, world!"
  }
}.render
#=> "<div><h1>Hello, world!</h1></div>"

Papercraft is designed for developer happiness, but it does not compromise on rendering performance. In fact, Papercraft offers best-in-class performance, equal to the performance of compiled ERB/ERubi/Herb templates!

With features such as explicit template arguments, automatic HTML escaping, and builtin support for rendering markdown, Papercraft provides a comprehensive solution to your HTML templating needs.