JavaScript Templates for Java (jstemplates4j)

This project is an umbrella project which aims to run various popular JavaScript templates for the JVM.

At present the script engine from Java 8 - Nashorn is leveraged to power various JavaScript templates to run on the JVM. As the version numbers would suggest, this is still a work in progress.

The following JavaScript templates are supported:

1. Handlebars
2. Dust

The following JavaScript templates being considered to be supported in the near future:

• Underscore
• Backbone
• React

Features

• Lightweight - each library is just few KBs.
• Least dependencies - except for dependency on SLF4J api, every sub-project is mostly self-contained and requires no additional dependencies.
• Fast - runs on the Nashorn script engine which is fast.
• OSGi Ready - all the sub-projects are valid OSGi bundles.

Getting Started

Building this project requires Java 8 JDK (or higher) and Maven (http://maven.apache.org/) 3.0.0 or later. We recommend to use the latest Maven version.

Building

This project is not available as a binary in any repository, so you would have to build it. To build the project, it is required to first build the parent project independently, since the parent POM is not released to any public repository.

mvn install

Thereafter, the builder project (top level directory) can be built which is a reactor project to build all the sub-projects in this umbrella project.

mvn clean install

Using

This project requires JRE 8 (or higher) to run. All the compilers follow similar API for basic functioning.

Handlebars Example:

JSTemplateCompiler compiler = new Handlebars();
JSTemplate template = compiler.compile("Hello {{this}}"); // follow the templating language syntax
System.out.println(template.renderWithData(template, "Data Object for Handlebars"));

template = compiler.compile("Hello {{language}}"); // follow the templating language syntax
System.out.println(template.renderWithJSON(template, "{ \"language\" : \"Handlebars for Java\"}"));

Dust Example:

JSTemplateCompiler compiler = new Dust();
JSTemplate template = compiler.compile("Hello {.}"); // follow the templating language syntax
System.out.println(template.renderWithData(template, "Data Object for Dust"));

JSTemplate template = compiler.compile("Hello {language}"); // follow the templating language syntax
System.out.println(template.renderWithJSON(template, "{ \"language\" : \"Dust for Java\"}"));

Follow the README and documentation for the respective sub-projects for specific usage.

Contributing

This project is in very early stages and may not be fully compatible to its JavaScript counterpart, although a genuine effort has been made to enable the major functionalities available for the given templating framework.

I would encourage you to report bugs by creating issues in Github against this project, and submit bug-fixes & improvements by submitting pull requests.

License & Philosophy

This project is licensed under Apache 2.0 license. Although not required by the license, I would appreciate if you give me some credit when you fork it or copy major portions of it. Use this as a library or copy portions of code to yours, tweak it and open source what you create! Feedback for this work is most welcome. I am doing this for some credit and to learn.