Welcome to Margate’s documentation!

Contents:

Introduction

Margate is a templating engine for Python that compiles templates down to Python bytecode. It is mostly Django-compatible in spirit, though it falls short of being a drop-in replacement for Django templates.

Early performance testing suggests that it is around 10 times faster than regular Django templates.

Example

Simply instantiate a Compiler and call its compile() method with the template source:

template_source = """
<p>Hello {{ person }}, my name is {{ me }}
"""

compiler = margate.compiler.Compiler()
template_function = compiler.compile(template_source)

You now have a function that can be called to yield the rendered content. Pass variable values in keyword arguments:

print(template_function(person="alice",
                        me="a template"))

FAQ

Why oh why?

Mostly to learn about Python bytecode.

You don’t really expect the speed benefit to be worth it, do you?

Template rendering is extremely unlikely to be the bottleneck in your web application. Optimising it will at best save a constant overhead from each page view, and will have a proportionately lower impact on your slowest pages.

On the other hand, it’s free speed. It can probably save you a few milliseconds per page view, which might help when you’re trying to get your landing page to load as fast as possible. Assuming the templating language has all the same features, why wouldn’t you? Template expansion probably can’t be parallelised with anything else your web app is doing, so miliseconds here contribute directly to the bottom line.

What’s with the name?

The library was originally called Stencil, but it turns out that lots of people call their templating library Stencil, so I had to change.

I hate spending time thinking of names for projects, so when I get stuck I just use the name of an English seaside town. There are plenty of them and they are reasonably unique and memorable names.

Indices and tables