Grantlee v5.1.0 (Codename Außen hart und innen ganz weich) now available

The Grantlee community is pleased to announce the release of Grantlee version 5.1 (Mirror). Grantlee contains an implementation of the Django template system in Qt.

This release is binary and source compatible with the previous Qt5-based Grantlee release.

Following the pattern of naming Grantlee releases with German words and phrases I encounter, this release codename reflects the API being stable while the internals change a lot. Grantlee is “Allzeit bereit”, “einfach unerzetzlich” – it does everything “ganz ganz genau” :).

For the benefit of the uninitiated, Grantlee is a set of Qt based libraries including an advanced string template system in the style of the Django template system.

{# This is a simple template #}
{% for item in list %}
    {% if item.quantity == 0 %}
    We're out of {{ item.name }}!
    {% endif %}
{% endfor %}


The showcase feature in this release is the introduction of ==, !=, <, >, <=, >= and in operators for the if tag. Django has had this feature for many years, but it was missing from Grantlee until now.

Also notable in this release is several changes from Daniel of Cutelyst. Daniel ported Grantlee from QRegExp to the more modern QRegularExpression, better error checking, and lots of prototyping of the if operators feature.

In order to accommodate CMake IDE generators (Visual Studio/Xcode) plugins built in debug mode now gain a ‘d‘ postfix in their name. Grantlee built in debug mode will first search for a plugin with a ‘d‘ postfix and fall back to a name without the postfix. This should make it possible to use a different generator to build Grantlee than is used to build 3rd-party plugins (eg, NMake and Visual Studio), and still be able to use the resulting binaries.

All of the work on making everything work well with all CMake generators was concurrent with making use of Travis and AppVeyor. All changes to Grantlee now have a large quality gate configuration matrix to pass. Of course, Qt handles all the platform abstractions needed here in the C++, but people build with many different configurations, CMake generators and platforms which need to continue to work.

All of the other changes since the last release are mostly clean-ups and minor modernizations of various kinds

• Make it possible to build without QtScript and QtLinguistTools
• clazy-discovered cleanups
• Modernization
• Bump the CMake requirement to version 3.1 and the Qt requirement to version 5.3

I’m giving an introductory talk later today about Grantlee.

How do you use Grantlee?

Grantlee has been out in the wild for quite some years now. Development stagnated for a while as I was concentrating on other things, but I’m updating it now to prepare for a new release.

I’m giving a talk about it in just over a week (the first since 2009), and I’m wondering how people are using it these days. The last time I really investigated this was 6 years ago.

I’m really interested in knowing about other users of Grantlee and other use-cases where it fits. Here are some of the places I’m already aware of Grantlee in use:

Many areas of KDE PIM use Grantlee for rendering content such as addressbook entries and rss feeds along with some gui editors for creating a new look. The qgitx tool also uses it for rendering commits in the view with a simple template.

It is also used in the Cutelyst web framework for generating html, templated emails and any other use-cases users of that framework have.

There is also rather advanced Grantlee integration available in KDevelop for new class generation, using the same principles I blogged about some years ago.

It is also used by the subsurface application for creating dive summaries and reports. Skrooge also uses it for report generation.

It is used in Oyranos buildsystem, seemingly to generate some of the code compiled into the application.

Also on the subject of generating things, it seems to be used in TexturePacker, a tool for game developers to create efficient assets for their games. Grantlee enables one of the core selling points of that software, enabling it to work with any game engine.

Others have contacted me about using Grantlee to generate documentation, or to generate unit tests to feed to another DSL. That’s not too far from how kitemmodels uses it to generate test cases for proxy model crashes.

Do you know of any other users or use-cases for Grantlee? Let us know in the comments!