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Pug vs Smarty: What are the differences?

Comparing Pug and Smarty

Pug and Smarty are two popular template engines used for generating dynamic web pages. While both serve the same purpose, there are key differences between these two engines.

  1. Syntax: Pug, formerly known as Jade, uses indentation-based syntax where tags are represented by indentation instead of explicit closing tags. On the other hand, Smarty utilizes HTML-like syntax with special template tags enclosed by curly brackets.
  2. Ease of Use: Pug provides a concise and clean syntax, making it more beginner-friendly compared to Smarty. Pug's indentation-based syntax reduces the need for closing tags and improves code readability. Smarty, meanwhile, offers more tools for complex template handling, making it suitable for larger projects with advanced requirements.
  3. Expressiveness: Pug focuses on minimalism and simplicity, offering a limited feature set that encourages developers to write clean and concise code. In contrast, Smarty emphasizes flexibility and extensibility, providing a wide range of built-in functions and plugins for complex template manipulations.
  4. Integration with Other Technologies: Pug is primarily designed for use with Node.js and can seamlessly work with Express.js framework. Smarty, on the other hand, is a template engine for PHP and is commonly used with popular PHP frameworks like Laravel and Symfony.
  5. Template Inheritance: Pug supports template inheritance, allowing the creation of reusable layout templates through block declarations. Smarty also provides template inheritance, but the implementation is slightly different, utilizing parent-child relationship and separate template files.
  6. Development Community: Pug has a growing community of developers and an extensive ecosystem of plugins and resources available. Smarty, on the other hand, has been around for a longer time and has a mature community with a wealth of resources and a stable plugin ecosystem.

In summary, Pug and Smarty differ in syntax, ease of use, expressiveness, integration with other technologies, template inheritance, and the size and maturity of their development communities.

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Pros of Pug
Pros of Smarty
  • 138
    Elegant html
  • 90
    Great with nodejs
  • 59
    Open source
  • 59
    Very short syntax
  • 54
    Structured with indentation
  • 25
    Free
  • 6
    Really similar to Slim (from Ruby fame)
  • 6
    It's not HAML
  • 6
    Gulp
  • 5
    Clean syntax
  • 5
    Readable code
  • 5
    Easy setup
  • 5
    Difficult For Front End Developers,learn backend
  • 4
    Disdain for angled brackets
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    What is Pug?

    This project was formerly known as "Jade." Pug is a high performance template engine heavily influenced by Haml and implemented with JavaScript for Node.js and browsers.

    What is Smarty?

    Facilitating the separation of presentation (HTML/CSS) from application logic. This implies that PHP code is application logic, and is separated from the presentation

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    What companies use Pug?
    What companies use Smarty?
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    What tools integrate with Pug?
    What tools integrate with Smarty?
      No integrations found

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      Blog Posts

      Jun 19 2015 at 6:37AM

      ReadMe.io

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