"Linked Text":http://www.site.com


This syntax will result in the following HTML:

<a href="http://www.site.com">Linked Text</a>

Unfortunately, if you have a bang (!) in your “Linked Text,” most of the Textile engines that I used would not recognize it as an HTML link. Plextile does!

The only drawback, however minimal, to using Plextile is that it does not come with a pre-packaged JAR file. You have to take the compiled code and JAR it yourself. Now, for free, I’ll include how I integrated Plextile with Grails. Grails has a very nice codec feature that provides a facility to register encoders and decoders of textual data as methods on any object. Grails searches for classes following the convention XCodec and dynamically registers encodeAsX and decodeX methods on java.lang.Object so that any data can be encoded and decoded. Enter the TextileCodec:

import com.plink.plextile.TextParser

class TextileCodec {

   static encode = {str ->
      new TextParser().parseTextile(str, true)
   }

}

Believe it or not, that’s it! Here’s the GSP template for rendering a JUG meeting:

<div class="post">
  <h2>${event.title}<br/><br/><g:formatDate format="EEEE, MMMM dd, yyyy" date="${event.startTime}"/><br/><g:formatDate format="h:mm" date="${event.startTime}"/>-<g:formatDate format="h:mm a" date="${event.endTime}"/><br/><g:if test="${!event.archived}"><a href="http://jugevents.org/jugevents/event/${event.jugEventsId}">Click HERE to register!</a></g:if></h2>
  <div class="entry">
    <h2 class="title">Speaker/Topic:</h2>
    <p>${event.description.encodeAsTextile()}</p>
    <h2 class="title">Location/Directions:</h2>
    <p>${event.location}</p>
    <p>${event.directions.encodeAsTextile()}</p>
  </div>
</div>

Enjoy!