HTML Templates in Javascript? Without coding in the page?

Question

I am a web guy doing mostly Perl server-side stuff, and I\'m slowly coming to a few conclusions.

• It is far better to do most of your code via Javascript and t

Answer 1

You should check out google closure template. It's completely independent so you can use it with any lib you want. It's a templating tool written in java.

http://code.google.com/closure/templates/docs/helloworld_js.html

It allows you to create a template on the server, run a java "compiler" on it and the output is a javascript function that takes json as its parameter.

{namespace examples}
/**
 * Greets a person using "Hello" by default.
 * @param name The name of the person.
 * @param? greetingWord Optional greeting word to use instead of "Hello".
 */
{template .helloName}
  {if not $greetingWord}
    Hello {$name}!
  {else}
    {$greetingWord} {$name}!
  {/if}
{/template}

This will generate a function called examples.helloName that can be called like

Their format is very IDE friendly, I get all the HTML syntax highlighting when editing the templates

examples.helloName({name: 'Ana', greetingWord:"Howdy"});

You can call other templates from within templates, it automatically html escapes your data (unless you tell it not to), provides bidirection support.

Another great thing is the fact that the templating tool can also generate java code. So somebody writing an app that must support browsers with scripting disabled can generate the HTML on the server if necessary.

Last but not least, unlike other js templating systems (), the template is parsed on the server, so the client side only has to do the merging of the template and data, the parsing of the template is done as a build step on the server.

http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/dev/docs/?class=Ext.XTemplate is an example of a templating tool that runs completely on the client. There are two problems with this approach, the parsing of the template is done on the client and your html has to be embedded in a javascript string. However, some IDEs (Intellij) will highlight the HTML inside JS strings).