C..2 Cheetah vs. Velocity

For a basic introduction to Velocity, visit http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity.

Velocity is a Java template engine. It's older than Cheetah, has a larger user base, and has better examples and docs at the moment. Cheetah, however, has a number of advantages over Velocity:

Cheetah is written in Python. Thus, it's easier to use and extend.
Cheetah's syntax is closer to Python's syntax than Velocity's is to Java's.
Cheetah has a powerful caching mechanism. Velocity has no equivalent.
It's far easier to add data/objects into the namespace where $placeholder values are extracted from in Cheetah. Velocity calls this namespace a 'context'. Contexts are dictionaries/hashtables. You can put anything you want into a context, BUT you have to use the .put() method to populate the context; e.g.,
```
VelocityContext context1 = new VelocityContext();
context1.put("name","Velocity");
context1.put("project", "Jakarta");
context1.put("duplicate", "I am in context1");
```
Cheetah takes a different approach. Rather than require you to manually populate the 'namespace' like Velocity, Cheetah will accept any existing Python object or dictionary AS the 'namespace'. Furthermore, Cheetah allows you to specify a list namespaces that will be searched in sequence to find a varname-to-value mapping. This searchList can be extended at run-time.
If you add a `foo' object to the searchList and the `foo' has an attribute called 'bar', you can simply type $bar in the template. If the second item in the searchList is dictionary 'foofoo' containing {'spam':1234, 'parrot':666}, Cheetah will first look in the `foo' object for a `spam' attribute. Not finding it, Cheetah will then go to `foofoo' (the second element in the searchList) and look among its dictionary keys for `spam'. Finding it, Cheetah will select foofoo['spam'] as $spam's value.
In Cheetah, the tokens that are used to signal the start of $placeholders and #directives are configurable. You can set them to any character sequences, not just $ and #.