= Radius -- Powerful Tag-Based Templates

Radius is a powerful tag-based template language for Ruby inspired by the
template languages used in MovableType[http://www.movabletype.org] and
TextPattern[http://www.textpattern.com]. It uses tags similar to XML, but can
be used to generate any form of plain text (HTML, e-mail, etc...).


== Usage

With Radius, it is extremely easy to create custom tags and parse them. Here's a small
example:

  require 'radius'
  
  # Define tags on a context that will be available to a template:
  context = Radius::Context.new do |c|
    c.define_tag 'hello' do
      'Hello world'
    end
    c.define_tag 'repeat' do |tag|
      number = (tag.attr['times'] || '1').to_i
      result = ''
      number.times { result << tag.expand }
      result
    end
  end
  
  # Create a parser to parse tags that begin with 'r:'
  parser = Radius::Parser.new(context, :tag_prefix => 'r')
  
  # Parse tags and output the result
  puts parser.parse(%{A small example:\n<r:repeat times="3">* <r:hello />!\n</r:repeat>})

Output:

  A small example:
  * Hello world!
  * Hello world!
  * Hello world!


== Quick Start

Read the QUICKSTART file to get up and running with Radius.


== Requirements
 
Radius does not have any external requirements for using the library in your
own programs.
 
Ragel is required to create the ruby parser from the Ragel specification,
and both Ragel and Graphviz are required to draw the state graph for the
parser.


== Installation

It is recommended that you install Radius using the RubyGems packaging system:

  % gem install --remote radius


== License

Radius is released under the MIT license and is copyright (c) 2006-2010
John W. Long. A copy of the MIT license can be found in the LICENSE file.


== Roadmap

This is a prioritized roadmap for future releases:

1. Clean up the current code base. [Done]

2. Add support for multi-level contexts: tags should be able to be
   defined to only be valid within other sets of tags. [Done]

3. Create a simple DSL for defining contexts. [Done]

4. Optimize for speed, modify scan.rl to emit C.


== Development

The latest version of Radius can be found on RubyForge:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/radius

Experimental and development versions of Radius can be found on Github:
 
http://github.com/jlong/radius

If you are interested in helping with the development of Radius, feel free to
fork the project on GitHub and send me a pull request.


John Long ::
http://wiseheartdesign.com
