Sanity

Sanity := Server Side Rendering - Templates

Sanity is a Go library for server-side HTML rendering. Sanity is inspired by the component-based architecture of modern UI toolkits like React. Components are written as normal Go functions that return an html.Node. The advantage of using Go over HTML templating is that Go is more flexible than most HTML templating languages and has better tooling support for type checking and auto-completion. It also allows the use of Go control flow instead of using a mediocure language embedded in the template.

go get github.com/jeffswenson/sanity@latest

package main

import (
	"fmt"

	"github.com/jeffswenson/sanity/pkg/attr"
	"github.com/jeffswenson/sanity/pkg/html"
	"github.com/jeffswenson/sanity/pkg/tag"
)

var fruit = []string { "apple", "orange", "banana" }

// Calling fruitView(fruit) produces the following html:
//
// <ul class="fruit-list">
//     <li>apple</li>
//     <li>orange</li>
//     <li>banana</li>
// </ul>
func fruitView(fruitList []string) html.Node {
	return tag.UL(
		attr.Class("fruit-list"), 
		html.ForEach(fruitList, func(fruit string) html.Node {
			return tag.LI(html.InnerText(fruit)) 
		}),
	)
}

func main() {
    node := fruitView(fruit)
    fmt.Print(node)
}

API

The Sanity API is broken into three packages.

• pkg/html: contains the core implementation and utilities
• tag: contains a function for every HTML tag
• attr: contains a function for every HTML attribute

The tag and attr packages are implemented using public functions from html. So it is possible to create tags and attributes that are not part of the standard by using the functions declared in html.

The function header comments in tag and attr were written by Chat GPT, so take them with a grain of salt. All other documentation and all code was written the old fashioned way.

Testing

Simple components can be tested using the html.Node.String() function. For more complicated structures, use something like the goquery library to parse the generated output.

Performance

The benchmarks contained in the sanity package suggest sanity is more cpu efficient than text/html for templates with many dynamic ({{}}) blocks. Using sanity to generate the HTML is also much cheaper than compressing the HTML with gzip, so sanity views are unlikely to be a significant portion of an application's resource consumption footprint.