ASP NET MVC View Engine Comparison

Question

I ve been searching on SO  amp  Google for a breakdown of the various View Engines available for ASP NET MVC  but haven t found much more than simple high-level descriptions of what a view engine is   I m not necessarily looking for  best  or  fastest  but rather some real world comparisons of advantages   disadvantages of the major players  e g  the default WebFormViewEngine  MvcContrib View Engines  etc   for various situations   I think this would be really helpful in determining if switching from the default engine would be advantageous for a given project or development group   Has anyone encountered such a comparison

User · Answer

My current choice is Razor  It is very clean and easy to read and keeps the view pages very easy to maintain  There is also intellisense support which is really great  ALos  when used with web helpers it is really powerful too   To provide a simple sample    Model namespace model  lt  Doctype html gt   lt html gt   lt head gt   lt title gt Test Razor lt  title gt   lt  head gt   lt body gt   lt ul class  mainList  gt   foreach var x in ViewData model     lt li gt  x PropertyName lt  li gt     lt  ul gt   lt  body gt    And there you have it  That is very clean and easy to read  Granted  that s a simple example but even on complex pages and forms it is still very easy to read and understand   As for the cons  Well so far  I m new to this  when using some of the helpers for forms there is a lack of support for adding a CSS class reference which is a little annoying   Thanks Nathj07

User · Answer

Check this SharpDOM   This is a c  4 0 internal dsl for generating html and also asp net mvc view engine

User · Answer

I know this doesn t really answer your question  but different View Engines have different purposes   The Spark View Engine  for example  aims to rid your views of  tag soup  by trying to make everything fluent and readable   Your best bet would be to just look at some implementations   If it looks appealing to the intent of your solution  try it out   You can mix and match view engines in MVC  so it shouldn t be an issue if you decide to not go with a specific engine

User · Answer

ASP NET MVC View Engines  Community Wiki   Since a comprehensive list does not appear to exist  let s start one here on SO  This can be of great value to the ASP NET MVC community if people add their experience  esp  anyone who contributed to one of these    Anything implementing IViewEngine  e g  VirtualPathProviderViewEngine  is fair game here   Just alphabetize new View Engines  leaving WebFormViewEngine and Razor at the top   and try to be objective in comparisons     System Web Mvc WebFormViewEngine  Design Goals      A view engine that is used to render a   Web Forms page to the response    Pros    ubiquitous since it ships with ASP NET MVC familiar experience for ASP NET developers IntelliSense can choose any language with a CodeDom provider  e g  C   VB NET  F   Boo  Nemerle  on-demand compilation or precompiled views   Cons    usage is confused by existence of  classic ASP NET  patterns which no longer apply in MVC  e g  ViewState PostBack  can contribute to anti-pattern of  tag soup  code-block syntax and strong-typing can get in the way IntelliSense enforces style not always appropriate for inline code blocks can be noisy when designing simple templates   Example    lt    Control Inherits  System Web Mvc ViewPage lt IEnumerable lt Product gt  gt     gt   lt   if model Any        gt   lt ul gt       lt   foreach var p in model    gt       lt li gt  lt   p Name  gt  lt  li gt       lt     gt   lt  ul gt   lt   else   gt       lt p gt No products available lt  p gt   lt     gt      System Web Razor  Design Goals   Pros    Compact  Expressive  and Fluid   Easy to Learn Is not a new language Has great Intellisense Unit Testable Ubiquitous  ships with ASP NET MVC   Cons    Creates a slightly different problem from  tag soup  referenced above  Where the server tags actually provide structure around server and non-server code  Razor confuses HTML and server code  making pure HTML or JS development challenging  see Con Example  1  as you end up having to  escape  HTML and   or JavaScript tags under certain very common conditions  Poor encapsulation reuseability  It s impractical to call a razor template as if it were a normal method - in practice razor can call code but not vice versa  which can encourage mixing of code and presentation  Syntax is very html-oriented  generating non-html content can be tricky   Despite this  razor s data model is essentially just string-concatenation  so syntax and nesting errors are neither statically nor dynamically detected  though VS NET design-time help mitigates this somewhat   Maintainability and refactorability can suffer due to this  No documented API  http   msdn microsoft com en-us library system web razor aspx   Con Example  1  notice the placement of  string                  lt h3 gt Team Members lt  h3 gt  string   teamMembers     Matt    Joanne    Robert        foreach  var person in teamMembers                 lt p gt  person lt  p gt              Bellevue  Design goals         Respect HTML as first-class language as opposed to treating it as  just text      Don t mess with my HTML  The data binding code  Bellevue code  should be separate from HTML    Enforce strict Model-View separation        Brail  Design Goals      The Brail view engine has been ported   from MonoRail to work with the   Microsoft ASP NET MVC Framework  For   an introduction to Brail  see the   documentation on the Castle project   website    Pros    modeled after  wrist-friendly python syntax  On-demand compiled views  but no precompilation available    Cons    designed to be written in the language Boo   Example    lt html gt       lt head gt           lt title gt   title  lt  title gt   lt  head gt       lt body gt                lt p gt The following items are in the list  lt  p gt          lt ul gt  lt  for element in list     output   lt li gt   element  lt  li gt    gt  lt  ul gt        lt p gt I hope that you would like Brail lt  p gt       lt  body gt   lt  html gt      Hasic     Hasic uses VB NET s XML literals instead of strings like most other view engines    Pros    Compile-time checking of valid XML Syntax colouring Full intellisense Compiled views Extensibility using regular CLR classes  functions  etc Seamless composability and manipulation since it s regular VB NET code Unit testable   Cons    Performance  Builds the whole DOM before sending it to client     Example   Protected Overrides Function Body   As XElement     Return        lt body gt           lt h1 gt Hello  World lt  h1 gt       lt  body gt  End Function     NDjango  Design Goals      NDjango is an implementation of the   Django Template Language on the  NET   platform  using the F  language    Pros    NDjango release 0 9 1 0 seems to be more stable under stress than WebFormViewEngine Django Template Editor with syntax colorization  code completion  and as-you-type diagnostics  VS2010 only  Integrated with ASP NET  Castle MonoRail and Bistro MVC frameworks     NHaml  Design Goals       NET port of Rails Haml view engine    From the Haml website       Haml is a markup language that s used   to cleanly and simply describe the   XHTML of any web document  without the   use of inline code    Haml avoids the   need for explicitly coding XHTML into   the template  because it is actually   an abstract description of the XHTML    with some code to generate dynamic   content    Pros    terse structure  i e  D R Y   well indented clear structure C  Intellisense  for VS2008 without ReSharper    Cons    an abstraction from XHTML rather than leveraging familiarity of the markup No Intellisense for VS2010   Example    type IEnumerable lt Product gt  - if model Any       ul     - foreach  var p in model         li  p Name - else    p No products available     NVelocityViewEngine  MvcContrib   Design Goals      A view engine based upon   NVelocity which is a  NET port   of the popular Java project   Velocity    Pros    easy to read write concise view code   Cons    limited number of helper methods available on the view does not automatically have Visual Studio integration  IntelliSense  compile-time checking of views  or refactoring    Example    foreach   p in  viewdata Model   beforeall      lt ul gt   each      lt li gt  p Name lt  li gt   afterall      lt  ul gt   nodata       lt p gt No products available lt  p gt   end     SharpTiles  Design Goals      SharpTiles is a partial port of JSTL   combined with concept behind the Tiles   framework  as of Mile stone 1     Pros    familiar to Java developers XML-style code blocks   Cons          Example    lt c if test    not fn empty Page Tiles    gt     lt p class  note  gt       lt fmt message key  page tilesSupport   gt     lt  p gt   lt  c if gt      Spark View Engine  Design Goals      The idea is to allow the html to   dominate the flow and the code to fit   seamlessly    Pros    Produces more readable templates C  Intellisense   for VS2008 without ReSharper  SparkSense plug-in for VS2010  works with ReSharper  Provides a powerful Bindings feature to get rid of all code in your views and allows you to easily invent your own HTML tags   Cons    No clear separation of template logic from literal markup  this can be mitigated by namespace prefixes    Example    lt viewdata products  IEnumerable  Product     gt   lt ul if  products Any    gt       lt li each  var p in products  gt   p Name  lt  li gt   lt  ul gt   lt else gt       lt p gt No products available lt  p gt   lt  else gt    lt Form style  background-color olive   gt       lt Label For  username    gt       lt TextBox For  username    gt       lt ValidationMessage For  username  Message  Please type a valid username     gt   lt  Form gt      StringTemplate View Engine MVC  Design Goals         Lightweight  No page classes are created    Fast  Templates are written to the Response Output stream    Cached  Templates are cached  but utilize a FileSystemWatcher to detect   file changes    Dynamic  Templates can be generated on the fly in code    Flexible  Templates can be nested to any level    In line with MVC principles  Promotes separation of UI and Business   Logic  All data is created ahead of   time  and passed down to the template       Pros    familiar to StringTemplate Java developers   Cons    simplistic template syntax can interfere with intended output  e g  jQuery conflict      Wing Beats     Wing Beats is an internal DSL for creating XHTML  It is based on F  and includes an ASP NET MVC view engine  but can also be used solely for its capability of creating XHTML     Pros    Compile-time checking of valid XML Syntax colouring Full intellisense Compiled views Extensibility using regular CLR classes  functions  etc Seamless composability and manipulation since it s regular F  code Unit testable   Cons    You don t really write HTML but code that represents HTML in a DSL      XsltViewEngine  MvcContrib   Design Goals      Builds views from familiar XSLT   Pros    widely ubiquitous familiar template language for XML developers XML-based time-tested Syntax and element nesting errors can be statically detected    Cons    functional language style makes flow control difficult XSLT 2 0 is  probably   not supported    XSLT 1 0 is much less practical

User · Answer

I think this list should also include samples of each view engine so users can get a flavour of each without having to visit every website    Pictures say a thousand words and markup samples are like screenshots for view engines    So here s one from my favourite Spark View Engine   lt viewdata products  IEnumerable  Product     gt   lt ul if  products Any    gt     lt li each  var p in products  gt   p Name  lt  li gt   lt  ul gt   lt else gt     lt p gt No products available lt  p gt   lt  else gt

User · Answer

I like ndjango  It is very easy to use and very flexible  You can easily extend view functionality with custom tags and filters  I think that  greatly tied to F   is rather advantage than disadvantage

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