Brainy

Brainy is a replacement for the popular Smarty templating language. It is a fork from the Smarty 3 trunk.

Brainy is still very new and it's likely that you will encounter some issues. Please report any problems that you encounter.

Why Brainy?

• Brainy generates cleaner and faster code than Smarty by default.
• Brainy removes features that are infrequently used and increase code bloat. Brainy's feature set promotes best practices and discourages hacks.
• Brainy is safer than Smarty in that it removes support for features like eval and injecting arbitrary PHP into a template.

Getting Started

Check out the Getting Started page on the wiki.

Minimum Requirements

• PHP 5.3.2 or higher
• (optionally) HHVM 3.1.x or higher

Unlike Smarty 3, PHP 5.2.x is not a supported platform. Use Brainy with old versions of PHP at your own risk.

Note that HHVM support is currently experimental, though most common behaviors work as expected.

Differences from Smarty

While Brainy will work as a drop-in replacement for Smarty in most applications, there are some differences that may make it difficult to switch.

A complete list of differences is listed on the wiki.

Contributing to Brainy

For information on how to set up a local dev environment and run the tests, see the wiki page on Hacking on Brainy.

Where is Brainy headed?

The following is the direction that the project is headed in:

• Phase 1: Provide a clean, drop-in replacement for Smarty that generates cleaner code and increases code quality.
• Phase 2: Provide a backwards-compatible interface for allowing templates to compile and render asynchronously.
• Phase 3: Allow templates to be compiled to Hack and add full async support.

See the project roadmap for information on upcoming releases.

Requested Contributions

If you're interested in helping out, pull requests for the following tasks will be warmly welcomed:

• Convert all non-public methods to use camel case.
• Add proper PHPDoc annotations to all functions and methods.
• Remove magic and bad practices:
  • __call, __get, etc.
  • Eliminate dead code
  • @ error suppression
  • etc.
• Remove workarounds for unsupported versions of PHP.

At the time of writing, the project has approximately 68% line coverage.

Support

Need to contact us directly? Email oss@box.com and be sure to include the name of this project in the subject.

Copyright and License

Copyright 2014 Box, Inc. All rights reserved.

Copyright 2002 – 2014 New Digital Group, Inc.

This library is licensed under the GNU Lesser Public License. A copy of the license should have been provided.