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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Templating Languages & Extensions
  4. Templating Languages And Extensions
  5. Pug vs Smarty

Pug vs Smarty

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Pug
Pug
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.2K
Votes467
Smarty
Smarty
Stacks3.2K
Followers71
Votes0

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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Detailed Comparison

Pug
Pug
Smarty
Smarty

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.

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

Statistics
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
3.2K
Followers
1.2K
Followers
71
Votes
467
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 138
    Elegant html
  • 90
    Great with nodejs
  • 59
    Very short syntax
  • 59
    Open source
  • 54
    Structured with indentation
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Node.js
Node.js
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Pug, Smarty?

TypeScript

TypeScript

TypeScript is a language for application-scale JavaScript development. It's a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.

Handlebars.js

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.

Mustache

Mustache

Mustache is a logic-less template syntax. It can be used for HTML, config files, source code - anything. It works by expanding tags in a template using values provided in a hash or object. We call it "logic-less" because there are no if statements, else clauses, or for loops. Instead there are only tags. Some tags are replaced with a value, some nothing, and others a series of values.

Slim Lang

Slim Lang

Slim is a template language whose goal is to reduce the view syntax to the essential parts without becoming cryptic. It started as an exercise to see how much could be removed from a standard html template (<, >, closing tags, etc...). As more people took an interest in Slim, the functionality grew and so did the flexibility of the syntax.

RactiveJS

RactiveJS

Ractive was originally created at theguardian.com to produce news applications. Ractive takes your Mustache templates and transforms them into a lightweight representation of the DOM – then when your data changes, it intelligently updates the real DOM.

EJS

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.

Jinja

Jinja

It is a full featured template engine for Python. It has full unicode support, an optional integrated sandboxed execution environment, widely used and BSD licensed.

Twig

Twig

It is a modern template engine for PHP. It is flexible, fast, and secure. Its syntax originates from Jinja and Django templates.

Nunjucks

Nunjucks

Rich Powerful language with block inheritance, autoescaping, macros, asynchronous control, and more. Heavily inspired by jinja2. It supports all modern browsers.

Hogan.js

Hogan.js

Hogan.js is a 3.4k JS templating engine developed at Twitter. Use it as a part of your asset packager to compile templates ahead of time or include it in your browser to handle dynamic templates.

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