Option for no view engine

[tobymurray]

With the wealth of front end frameworks available now, I don't find it appealing to use any of the view engines, though bootstrapping technologies like this project appeal to me. My use case is as follows:

• Angular front end transpiled/compiled/obfuscated/minified/whatever into a bunch of static blobs
• Nginx delivering the client (bunch of static blobs)
• Express providing the API for the client and all the other goodness.

What are your thoughts on providing another flag (e.g. --view none) to avoid the view engine entirely? Perhaps if the same "plug-and-play" experience is desired the routes could serve up regular old HTML files from the public folder?

I can take a stab at adding it if it's viable.

[dougwilson]

I think that is a good idea.

[tobymurray]

I think I've got something close to working, but it's just a tiny bit awkward because "none" is different than every other view engine - e.g. the // view engine setup section doesn't need to be there. Looking at #141 - what are your thoughts about defaulting to no view engine? I think conceptually it makes sense, but it's definitely a change from the status quo.

You can take a look at the WIP below.

[dougwilson]

Yea, defaulting is certainly a discussion, but we can add it even without it being the default. A few PRs tried this previously, but got abandoned. The called it "static" instead of none, which is probably a good name for the engine.