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Castle Stronghold

Table of contents

1 Web Forms View Engine
2 NVelocity View Engine
3 Brail
4 AspView
5 StringTemplate View Engine

View Engines Comparison

» Home » MonoRail » Documentation » MonoRail trunk Documentation » View Engines » View Engines Comparison

Engine	Language	Compiled	Helpers	ViewComponents
WebForms	Any .net language	Yes	Yes	No
NVelocity	Velocity	No	Yes	Yes
Brail	boo	Yes	Yes	Yes
AspView (from Contrib)	C#	Yes	Yes	Yes
StringTemplate (from Contrib)	String Template	No	Partially	Yes

Web Forms View Engine

Pros:

Familiar .NET Syntax
Set of useful Web Controls

Cons:

Does not implement or support MVC logic, so it's easy to implement more logic than view logic on the web form, leading to scattered logic
Limitations apply, see the WebForms View Engine documentation
Although there is an open-source implementation of it, it is not patent-free and might be discontinued or become unsupported/incompatible in the long term.

NVelocity View Engine

Pros:

Limited set of functions forces you to code only view logic (good for separation of concerns)
Easy to learn template language
Same syntax as Velocity (for Java), allowing view reuse among different platforms
Reuse skills for people with Java experience

Cons:

Interpreted
Community seem very inactive. That forced Castle Project to fork NVelocity and work on improvements and bug fixes.

Brail

Pros:

Use the wrist friendly and feature-rich Boo language for templates.
Compiled (good performance!)

Cons:

Requires additional assemblies
Python syntax (which one can consider as a pro)

AspView

Pros:

uses C# so it's easier to adopt
Compiled (good performance!)
supports a "PreCompiled" mode, so you can deploy all your views to production in a single DLL file
Gives quite a good intellisense experience within Visual Studio 2005

Cons:

since C# is stricter than velocity and boo, you must declare the properties your view is using. You can, however, use the DictionaryAdapter integration and then avoid property decleration on the view level

StringTemplate View Engine

Pros:

ST template engine 'enforces' model-view separation.
Simple but powerful syntax with good documentation and articles. See the C# StringTemplate docs.
Same syntax as StringTemplate for Java, allowing view reuse among different platforms.
Actively developed and supported with a healthy user community

Cons:

Interpreted
Strict model-view separation means ST can't use MonoRail's helpers directly
Custom helpers must be written in StringTemplate language, instead of plain .NET classes
Requires additional assemblies
ViewEngine (integration with MonoRail) still in development