Code Generation With Templates

This book covers the topic of templates in software engineering. It book discusses the theoretical background of templates. The templates considered in the book are a concrete (incomplete) representation of the output document, i.e. object code, that contains holes, i.e. the meta code. It is a common pattern to generate dynamic webpages. The book shows that the metalanguage can be limited to the power of a tree-to-string transducer. Templates can be constructed in a way that their output is syntactical correct. Furthermore, an approach is discussed where the template evaluator explicitly guarantees syntactical correctness of the output.Beside the theoretical aspect of templates, practical issues and applications are discussed using a couple of (real-world) case studies. The architecture of code generators based on templates is presented. It is shown that a limited metalanguage improves separation of concerns. Furthermore, syntax-safe templates limit the chance of cross-site scripting related security breaches.