“I'm enamored with Cheetah”
- Sam Ruby, senior member of IBM's Emerging Technologies Group & director of Apache Software Foundation
“Give Cheetah a try. You won't regret it. ... Cheetah is a truly powerful system. ... Cheetah is a serious contender for the 'best of breed'”
- Alex Martelli, Google uber techie, core Python developer & author of several popular Python books
“There is no better solution than Cheetah.”
- William Dodé
“i did it in a single night (i _love_ cheetah templates ;)”
- Federico Di Gregorio, developer of Python's Postgresql library
“Cheetah is an order of magnitude faster than nevow, and it's more powerful and flexibile and its syntax is *much* more readable too IMHO. The speedup after moving klive (klive.cpushare.com) from nevow to Cheetah has been huge ... 300% speedup. I used klive as a test for Cheetah and it worked so well that I'm rewriting cpushare.com with ... Cheetah.”
- Andrea Arcangeli, the kernel hacker behind Linux's new virtual memory subsystem, and SUSE Linux employee
“I am currently in the process of re-doing the templating mechanism in RESTLog, throwing out my hand made templating scheme and replacing it with Cheetah and it's been a great success. I initially learned of Cheetah from Sam Ruby as he is using to write his own blogging software. The transformations are fast and Cheetah, to me, has struck just the right balance, sticking to adding features needed for templating and avoiding the tempation to become a full-blown language on it's own, instead deferring to Python when appropriate. ... Cheetah definitely passes by first cut utility test, in adding Cheetah to RESTLog my code got smaller and cleaner.”
- Joe Gregorio, editor of the IETF Atom Publishing Protocol specification (along with Bill de hÓra) and creator of the Python Sparklines Module
“Cheetah looks amazing. Wish I'd known about it before I went and invented my own damn templating language for my day project.”
“Cheetah seems to be practically the only web templating format with decent taste. On top of that, it doesn't try to limit the programmers with needless restrictions and hoops. ... reddit.com was recently rewritten with Python and Cheetah Templates. The project seems to have gone really well and the former-Lisp developers really enjoyed Cheetah's simple syntax.”
- Aaron Swartz, co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification
Happy little gophers... Socialserve.com is switching over from a J2EE stack (JBoss / JPublish (used Velocity for templating)) over to a fastcgi-based web publishing system with Cheetah as the star. Site-wide, we're currently serving an average of 68K pages (198K 'hits') per day, with the Cheetah'd pages doing more than 65% of that traffic. Our web traffic has doubled in the past 6 months, and that growth curve shows no sign of slowing down.

We have found Cheetah to be a gloriously flexible and powerful technology. Functions within templates allowed us to do far more elegant structured programming at the document level. Being able to use templates as python classes, importing constants and other goodies directly from our middleware python code really lets them act as first class code members instead of an ugly lesser citizen.”
“Cheetah is a powerful, stable and well documented templating system.”
- James Gardner
“Cheetah is very nice. Good code even!”
- Keith Devens
“People with a strong PHP background absolutely love Cheetah for being Smarty, but much, much better.”
- Marek Baczynski
“I am using Smarty and I know it very well, but compiled Cheetah Templates with its inheritance approach is much powerful and easier to use than Smarty.”
- Jaroslaw Zabiello
“A cheetah template can inherit from a python class, or a cheetah template, and a Python class can inherit from a cheetah template. This brings the full power of OO programming facilities to the templating system, and simply blows away other templating systems.”
- Mike Meyer
“Love your work guys.”
- Alex Le Dain
“I'm trying code generation with Cheetah. I have to say it's a pleasure compared to XSLT!”
- Alex J. Champandard
“Cheetah has successfully been introduced as a replacement for the overweight XSL Templates for code generation. Despite the power of XSL (and notably XPath expressions), code generation is better suited to Cheetah as templates are much easier to implement and manage.”
- The FEAR development team
“I'm greatly in favour of Cheetah.”
- Sybren Stuvel
“I ran across Cheetah, 'a Python-powered template engine and code generator', and haven't looked back since. ... it was a breeze to crank out several templates in a short period of time. In only a few hours a night, over three nights, I was able to learn enough about Python and Cheetah to write a code generator that generates my POJOs, DAOs, and WebWork2 action classes. ... Given my recent experience with Python and Cheetah, I can't imagine an easier way to generate code! ”
- Peter White, in an interview on the "Code Generation Network"
“Cheetah is very powerful and flexible.”
- Carsten Saathoff
“I've used Cheetah quite a bit and it's a very good package.”
- Kevin Dangoor, lead developer of TurboGears
“Cheetah is an extremely effective Python-powered template engine that can generate any text-based format. Cheetah's impressive yet simple template language (based on Python) can yield the most complex of documents ... Cheetah is surprisingly simple to use”
- Andrew Glover, in an article published on O'Reilly ONLamp.com
“Regarding the template engine, the best one I'm aware of is Cheetah.”
- Alessandro Bottoni
“Just a quick note to say thanks for the work you've put into Cheetah. I had this unholy hack of several perl scripts to do my html templating. After seeing the light and moving to Python, I dreaded rewriting all of that working code. But, after finding Cheetah, I seriously had something working in under an hour that is way better than all of those perl scripts that took me weeks to write. Awesome stuff.”
- Rob McMullen
“I write to say THANK YOU again! I'm very pleased to see such a friendly community. I appreciate your help! =)”
- Timur Izhbulatov
“I hand it to the makers: Cheetah is great stuff. I've used WebMacro for years and this even improves on it. Specifically I like the blocks/functions and the ability to dynamically derive (thanks to python for that”
- Torsten Rueger
“But, the problem is PHP itself has so many bad features that I prefer rather Python to PHP. And I like Cheetah's inheritence aproach because it is scales very well for complicated web pages. I can develop internet application much faster using Python (e.g. using application, very cool and pythonic Cherry2) and Cheetah. And because extending templates using OO techniques is tthe feature I like, I would rather choose Cheetach than ZPT, SimleTAL, Nevow and similar solutions.”
- Jaroslaw Zabiello
“Another great bonus of Spyce is that it can work with Cheetah, the one templating system which I felt like I could live with.”
- Jonathan P.
“My graphist and me found it excellent, fast, clear, simple, stable: Pythonic! We found the others engines too verbose ... I use it to generate html, latex and xml”
- William Dodé
“I was going to try and learn Kid, but I'm in a bit of a hurry, and Cheetah's much closer to what I'm used to.”
- Dave Benjamin
“Personally, I prefer to Cheetah Templates to PSP - it plays better in the OO world, and I can use intelligent HTML/XML/SGML editors on the files.”
- Mike Meyer
Cheetah was created by Tavis Rudd, a freelance programmer and designer, with contributions from many open source volunteers.
Its documentation is edited by Mike Orr, who also wrote its command line tool.
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