Comments on: Templates in JavaScript

By: dan

dan — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 17:51:25 +0000

Another new addition is Mjt at http://mjtemplate.org/. This is a offshoot of the Freebase product

By: Mark Fowler

Mark Fowler — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 12:58:13 +0000

We use JST as one of our standard libraries in Zimki for use both in the browser and for server-side templating. Most of the example applications (including the zimki blog, our own company website, etc) use it.

By: Edwin Khodabakchian

Edwin Khodabakchian — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 07:41:07 +0000

Ryan. Here is one more candidate to the list of Javascript template engines. It is called Miro: http://www.devhd.com/labs.htm

One of the benefits of Miro is that template files are pre-compiled into Javascript function. So the solition is very light weight: no library to include and minimized overhead at runtime.

I would be interested in hearing how people think Miro compares with the 3 options you listed.

Cheers, Edwin

By: Bjoern Klose

Bjoern Klose — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 05:04:18 +0000

I’m using Rails and the prototype Templating engine on a private project. Right now, I hardcoded the html into the js script, but I am going to put it into a seperate file, so that it can be edited on its own. There, I’m using the standard #{yourvar} syntax, so that it might even be reused for rendering a regular partial or action. I get my data as a string via AJAX (to keep things as short as possible), parse it into an array and then into a hash for template processing. Quite a lot of steps, but I’m not sure how best I am going to cache the datasets for later access.

The movie xml thing looks nice, but as with most of the tough AJAX scripting and animation things, it makes my Firefox to jump to the roof with its CPU usage.

By: Mikael Bergkvist

Mikael Bergkvist — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 18:30:34 +0000

Hi, there’s this engine that everyone seems to be missing. :-) http://www.naltabyte.se/movie/

And the xml is here.. http://www.naltabyte.se/movie/movie.xml

Note that it’s kinda fast.. up to 8x faster than the ususal javascript execution speed.

By: Kin Lane

Kin Lane — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 08:45:53 +0000

JST looks like it has a lot of potential. I looks easy to implement.

Thanks for the great info!

By: wioota

wioota — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 08:20:45 +0000

The main issue I have is that template tokens for these templating libraries are generally incompatible with server-side scripting tokens. Do we really want the designers or developers needing to know two types tokenisation. It would help if there was a standardised format of tokenising or more flexibility in choosing token scheme. I’d personally prefer one which used tags for tokens so they could be viewable in a browser even un-tokenised…

By: Ryan Campbell

Ryan Campbell — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:02:07 +0000

I guess the main reason would be for separtion of markup and JavaScript. If you need to edit the markup, you don’t even have to look through a JavaScript file and all of those concatenated strings.

But on your site, your approach makes sense. You’re the only one looking at your code, so you don’t have to separate it out for a designer. I guess I’m more interested on your thoughts on that approach vs the approach that you took.

By: Tobie Langel

Tobie Langel — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 06:43:28 +0000

Have you considered placing the template in the markup and then in the JS setting Magnolia.display = $(â€˜magnolia').innerHTML;

Well, that would mean showing some pretty strange content to legacy browsers... But I suppose it would be possible to overcome this, maybe by hiding the content through inline style and showing it with JS.

I'm not sure about the benefits though. What's your idea behind that question?

By: kourge

kourge — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:25:24 +0000

Prototype's Template object was part of the 1.5 release.