What is a template engine ?
If you are a web developer you probable already know what is it, or at least heard about it. A template engine is a tool that allows you to create templates for your application, this templates can be used to generate dynamic content. In our context we are going to use a template engine to create inventories for our plugin.
How its works ?
For example, we have a template like this:
<GuiLayout>
<Head>
<title tl="true">
[#FF6545] Welcome to my inventory
</title>
<rows>1</rows>
</Head>
<Items>
<-- Here we are going to put the items -->
</Items>
</GuiLayout>But we want to customize the title of the inventory, to say the name of the player, we can use a template engine to do this, in the NookureInventory we use the Pebble template engine, so we can do something like this:
<GuiLayout>
<Head>
<title tl="true">
[#FF6545] Welcome {{ player.name }} to my inventory
</title>
<rows>1</rows>
</Head>
<Items>
<-- Here we are going to put the items -->
</Items>
</GuiLayout>By default the openAsync(@NotNull Player player, @NotNull String layout) method will insert the player object in the context of the template engine, so you can use the player object in the template.
When you type player.name the template engine will search in the player object for a method called getName and will replace the player.name with the result of the method.
The template engine will search in the object in this order:
- player.getName()
- player.isName()
- player.hasName()
- player.name()
- player.name
This isn't awesome ? This is a simple example of what you can do with a template engine, you can do a lot more things with it, like loops, conditions, macros, etc.
I ABSOLUTY RECOMMEND reading the Pebble documentation to understand how the template engine works.
This affects the performance of my plugin ?
Yes, it does, but the impact is minimal and the engine works on another thread, so it won't affect the main thread of your server.