In Praise of Haml

26 May 2008 • Rails • Ruby

Our big celebrity charity news site runs on Rails, and I’ve just switched all the view code from erb to haml. I cut the total number of lines of view code from 2370 to 1788, which makes for a saving of 25%.

Note that I didn’t add any helper methods in the process, so the comparison should be quite fair. If I exclude blank lines from the comparison, the ratio is about the same, and it’s quite impressive given that a few of the views have significant text content inside them.

It took about half an hour to switch my brain over to thinking in Haml, and then it was plain sailing. To my eyes, the views are no less readable now, and are certainly more concise.

Deleting all those <% end %> tags was enormously satisfying, and almost made me miss Python syntax.

Here’s an example of a partial from the site before and after its conversion:

<div class="section">
<% if (with_birthday_today = Celebrity.all_alive_with_birthday_today).any? %>
<h3>Today's birthdays</h3>
<ul>
  <% for celebrity in with_birthday_today %>
<li><%= link_to_item celebrity %> is <%= celebrity.age_in_years_today %> years old</li>
  <% end %>
</ul>
<% elsif (upcoming_birthdays = Celebrity.birthdays_in_next_month(3)).any? %>
<h3>Upcoming birthdays</h3>
<ul>
  <% for celebrity in upcoming_birthdays %>
<li><%= link_to_item celebrity %> on <%= celebrity.birth_date.to_s(:short) %></li>
  <% end %>
</ul>
<% end %>
</div>

and in HAML:

.section
  - if (with_birthday_today = Celebrity.all_alive_with_birthday_today).any?
    %h3 Today's birthdays
    %ul
      - for celebrity in with_birthday_today
        %li== #{link_to_item celebrity} is #{celebrity.age_in_years_today} years old
  - elsif (upcoming_birthdays = Celebrity.birthdays_in_next_month(3)).any?
    %h3 Upcoming birthdays
    %ul
      - for celebrity in upcoming_birthdays
        %li== #{link_to_item celebrity} on #{celebrity.birth_date.to_s(:short)}

Haml’s just seen its 2.0 release, it’s approximately as fast as Erb, and the error messages are really pretty good now. (Occasionally I left a trailing %>, or forgot to indent after an - if ..., and these produced slightly obscure error messages.)

The new release has also added handy filters for embedding Javascript, Erb and the like inside Haml templates. I’m glad I’ve finally jumped on the bandwagon.

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