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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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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Learn MorePros of Pug
Pros of Smarty
Pros of Pug
- Elegant html138
- Great with nodejs90
- Open source59
- Very short syntax59
- Structured with indentation54
- Free25
- Really similar to Slim (from Ruby fame)6
- It's not HAML6
- Gulp6
- Clean syntax5
- Readable code5
- Easy setup5
- Difficult For Front End Developers,learn backend5
- Disdain for angled brackets4
Pros of Smarty
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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?
What tools integrate with Smarty?
No integrations found
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What are some alternatives to Pug and Smarty?
EJS
It is a simple templating language that lets you generate HTML markup with plain JavaScript. No religiousness about how to organize things. No reinvention of iteration and control-flow. It's just plain JavaScript.
Handlebars.js
Handlebars.js is an extension to the Mustache templating language created by Chris Wanstrath. Handlebars.js and Mustache are both logicless templating languages that keep the view and the code separated like we all know they should be.
React
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.
JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
Python
Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
















