I’ve been developing a little blog app lately, more as an exercise than anything else (though it will likely end up powering this site, as I’ve grown very tired of Typo). I’m trying out a couple of things with this application though, namely Test Driven Development and Markaby. I’m going to write something on doing TDD with Rails in the near future, but for now I wanted to talk quickly about Markaby. Markaby is an alternative to ERB, which is the default page markup language for Rails. Markaby does away with the angle brackets, and lets you use straight Ruby as your templating system.

Here’s a sample page in Markaby:

html do
head do
title action_name
stylesheet_link_tag ‘scaffold’
end
body do
p flash[:notice], :style => “color: green”
self << @content_for_layout
end
end

I wasn’t sure whether I’d like Markaby or not, but after writing some code, I’m enjoying it. The code is very clean since everything is in Ruby. You don’t have that somewhat unnatural mixture of Ruby and HTML that you get with ERB. I also find it much easier to read.

All in all, this seems to fit much better with Rails than ERB. The only downside is that in working with a designer, there would be a barrier. For a solo developer, however, it’s great.