refactor front-end templates & views

[niallo]

Jade is non-standard and poses a barrier to people contributing, as does the mishmash of backbone, apres and handrolled JS.

Suggestions for better solutions welcome.

[viniciusgama]

what is the plan? just curious since I'm feeling the pain to read all this jade code 👍

[niallo]

Yeah, definitely won't be Jade. I'm not sure what to use yet instead. Any suggestions?

/cc'ing @peterbraden for some pointers...

[peterbraden]

Yeah, I don't really know what the best template engine for node is at the moment. They all seem to suck in their own ways :)

Definitely want to look at a system where you can do modular views with templates so it's easy to add view code as plugins - dashboards etc.

[caseman]

Templates, almost by definition lack modularity. Something I was trying to address with dolphy.js until I realized I don't have any web apps I want to write in my spare time anymore ;) But the other main benefit was that they are valid JS data structures (JSON), so there is no parser, and you can manipulate them in code. Downside might be lack of beauty (ala Jade), but as I think we've determined, that's only skin deep.

[caseman]

Anyway if nothing else floats your boat, you can probably convince me to work on dolphy again. The code and tests are solid, but it totally lacks docs and real-world use. Obviously writing some docs would be priority zero. It is designed to work with node and requirejs out of the box, so it could be used both server and client-side.

[niallo]

Current suggestions:

• EJS: http://www.embeddedjs.com
• Swig: http://paularmstrong.github.com/swig/
• Dolphy: https://github.com/caseman/dolphy

Thoughts/additional ideas?

[caseman]

there's always handlebars: http://handlebarsjs.com/

IMHO ejs and swig smell too much like JSPs.

[caseman]

I'm also curious what soured you on Jade. Can't be the significant whitespace ;)

[peterbraden]

Jade syntax is super ugly and hard to parse, I personally detest template
engines that eschew html.

I actually like swig - template inheritance is super useful in this sort of
scenario. EJS is also widely known and used, so is a reasonable choice.

handlebars is a little too logicless to be easy to use here - while it's
great for manipulating snippets of html, it gets clunky when you're doing
the whole page.

There's also a bunch more engines - I'd be interested to look at some of
the ones that include clientside rendering too.

On 12 March 2013 15:31, Casey Duncan notifications@github.com wrote:

I'm also curious what soured you on Jade. Can't be the significant
whitespace ;)

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/21#issuecomment-14810251
.

Peter Braden

http://PeterBraden.co.uk/

[viniciusgama]

What about Bliss (https://github.com/cstivers78/bliss)? Is a javascript implementation of the asp.net razor view engine. Pretty easy.

[peterbraden]

I personally don't like template engines that embed a language within another, the less logic the better imho.

On Mar 12, 2013, at 8:28 PM, Vinícius Gama notifications@github.com wrote:

What about Bliss (https://github.com/cstivers78/bliss)? Is a javascript implementation of the asp.net razor view engine. Pretty easy.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[viniciusgama]

you're talking about the way it uses javascript inside the view?

@function display(product) {
  <li>@product.name ($@product.price)</li>
}

<ul>
  @products.forEach(display)
</ul>

[peterbraden]

Right

On Mar 12, 2013, at 9:10 PM, Vinícius Gama notifications@github.com wrote:

you're talking about the way it uses javascript inside the view?

@function display(product) {

@product.name ($@product.price)

}

@products.forEach(display)

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[niallo]

Think swig makes the most sense. @peterbraden's argument is to use template inheritance for the nascent front-end extension system.

[peterbraden]

We're now using swig. Fixed!