We will be learning the programming language Rust by building a
Static Site Generator
This project is aimed towards developers that are just starting out with the
language, as such we will be working gradually towards our end goal of a fully
functional SSG. We will be introducing ourselves into the project by learning
ohw to make a lexer and a parser for injecting data into HTML files. We
will cover encoding/decoding files (this should allow us to get to grips with
how file management works in Rust).
Finally, this is project is merely for educational purposes for now, should the project gain more contributors & features develop into more robust ones, we could potentially focus on a proper production level application.
According to
Cloudflare,
a Static Site Generator is defined as the following:
A static site generator is a tool that generates a full static HTML website based on raw data and a set of templates. Essentially, a static site generator automates the task of coding individual HTML pages and gets those pages ready to serve to users ahead of time
This means that an end user can build a site (be it a blog, etc) with their
preferred language of choice (Javascript, Rust or even Markdown) & the tool will
process that file into a legit HTML syntax.
A Static Site Generator can have any number of features. For our
implementation, we will be trying to get the following:
- HTML Template Engine (via JSON Objects)
- Markdown to HTML Parser
A definition that can be found to best describe a Template Engine can be
pulled from wiki:
A template processor (also known as a template engine or template parser) is software designed to combine templates with a data model to produce result documents.[1] [2] [3] The language that the templates are written in is known as a template language or templating language
Popular template engines such as Handlebars, Pugs, & Mustache allow developers to dynamically inject data into HTML documents via their APIs. An example could be a Blog site, where a user needs to populate the page with links to blog articles that are saved on an external server. These HTML files will have special syntax to let the engine know where in the document to populate the data. This is what we will be aiming to create as part of the overall project.
Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to add formatting elements to plain text text documents. HTML is the language of the internet. It can be a little more complex and verbose everything, from headers, to images must be wrapped in tags. Apart of this generator will be to give the end user the ability to write in Markdown and compile it into usable HTML.