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Nova was designed and developed mainly as a 'fun' project with the goal of creating a template engine that was fully written as JavaScript (not JSON), to compliment the current state some apps are at of "Client, Server, Database" using JavaScript.
Nova will let you write templates with the full power of JavaScript and Node.JS, in a format your current IDE or editor already provides Syntax hilighting for!
Almost every other template engine has some unique format to it, in which no-ones editor can provide syntax & highlighting support for. But Nova will be 100% pure JavaScript, letting your editor provide nice features such as syntax checking, syntax hilighting, code completion, source formatting, indentation settings etc.
Nova does not conform to the current day ideology of what a template engine should or should not do. Node provides you the tools to do a job, and lets you do your job however you please.
If you want to read more on Nova vs Template Engine Ideology, check out my initial Nova blog post
Or read other blog topics on Nova: http://aikar.co/category/projects/nova/
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To install with npm, type
npm install novaThen in your project
require('nova');
To install with Git, type
- As a submodule of a GIT controlled project:
cd /your/projectgit submodule add git@github.com:Aikar/node-nova.git <path/to/libs/nova>git submodule initgit submodule update- then in your project
require('./path/to/libs/nova');
- As a git clone to non GIT project
cd /your/project/libs/git clone git@github.com:Aikar/node-nova.git nova- then in your project
require('./path/to/libs/nova');
First off, every template must contain 1 function as its body. Do everything inside of this functions scope Next, The root function takes 1 parameter, recommended to name it
nova
Your function should look like this:
function(nova) {
return {};
}
Everything returned by the function is going to be your template.
A DOM node in a Nova template is represented as an object, like so:
{html:[{args}, [childrennodes]
As you see here, It's a simple 1 property Object, who's value should be an array. Args and children nodes are optional, so a plain
{br:[]}would render as<br/>
If you do not pass an array as a value to the object key, Nova will guess as to what you intended. For example,
{div:{id:'foo'}}is equivalent to{div:[{id:'foo'}]}
And if you pass anything else other than an array as the value, that value is interpreted as a child node, for example:
{span:1}would render as<span>1</span>and is equivalent to{span:[[1]]}
Additionally, if a more than 1 value is passed to the array and the first is not an object (attributes), the array is treated as if it was the children nodes array.
For example:
{div:['Hello', 'to you sir!']}
is equivalent to
{div:[['Hello', 'to you sir!']]}
Nova tries to make it as hard as possible for you to confuse it. Almost any syntax will work. The only exception is passing Nova syntax nodes to the array, since they are objects, so the following is NOT valid:
{div:[{span:'Hello'}]}
There is no way for Nova to know if you intended that to be an attribute or a child node, so you must use
{div:[[{span:'Hello'}]]}
Nova parses 1 node at a time, and can handle the following types:
Process Node
-
Object
Processed as stated above into HTML. Anything passed as a Child Node to the Node is then walked into and processed also. -
Array
States that the array contains multiple nodes to process, and will process each item in the array.{span:'Hi'}, [ {span:'Hi'}, {span:'Hi'}, {span:'Hi'}, ] {span:'Hi'},
Is the same as:
{span:'Hi'},
{span:'Hi'},
{span:'Hi'},
{span:'Hi'},
{span:'Hi'},
You will not usually directly use arrays in your template, but functions (described next) may return them
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Function
Any function in your template is executed AT COMPILE TIME!
The return value of the function will be then inserted into the template for compile.
You may not
Benchmarking has been done, and Nova will average under 1 millisecond per render, unless you use async operations in the template.
Due to the ability to run async operations inside of your onRender blocks, its hard to say a definite answer to render time, and considering the number of onRender functions you use, and what things you do in the template can all affect the time.
But based on my own benchmarks, using a template that utilizes some of everything Nova can do, the average render time was 0.4ms.
In other words, it's pretty fast. Compared to other template engines, Nova is nowhere near the top, but I feel the speed it renders is 100% acceptable, and the features and style it provides are interesting.
If your application is slowing down, I'm going to find it really hard to believe that nanosecond optimizations are going to be your solution. In other words, Nova's performance is "More than enough".
Many of those other fast engines are basic and do not give as much flexibility that Nova provides.
File bugs at GitHub please Github Issues.
Fork, commit, send pull request.
None yet.
Nova is licensed under the MIT license.
Copyright (c) 2011 Daniel Ennis Aikar@Aikar.co
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.