cfis : A Simple, Lightweight JavaScript Templating Engine

Comment on A Simple, Lightweight JavaScript Templating Engine by Sebastian Good

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 17:15:52 -0600

Clever. As a minor performance enhancement, might I suggest using a common JavaScript idiom for building large strings. Your compiler turns literals in the output into strings which are added to the “out” variable using +=, meaning an entire new string is allocated. These strings get bigger and bigger, leading not just to wasted memory but also (roughly) quadratic running time. Big templates will suddenly be a lot slower than small ones.

Might I suggest you use the following pattern.

var out = []; out.push “string1”; out.push “string2”; out = out.join(“”); // “string1string2”

Each generated string is simply added to a list and then in one fell swoop the (very fast) compiled function join can make them into your final output.

Comment on A Simple, Lightweight JavaScript Templating Engine by http://abstractfinal.blogspot.com

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 18:22:16 -0600

Very cool… As you mentioned, most useful when accessing services that return json.

Comment on A Simple, Lightweight JavaScript Templating Engine by cfis

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:10:37 -0600

Sebastian - that is an excellent point. I have to admit that I’m a bit embarrassed that it didn’t occur to me - I use the same trick a fair bit. Anyway, I’ll update the code and repost it.

Comment on A Simple, Lightweight JavaScript Templating Engine by cfis

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:13:10 -0600

Keyur - Thanks for the comment. I hadn’t seen your blog before, looks great. I’ll have to dig through your REST posts, its a favorite topic of mine.

Trackback from Lucumr Cogitations: ERB for JavaScript on A Simple, Lightweight JavaScript Templating Engine

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 08:23:08 -0600

Today I found this at reddit and was stunned by the way it was implemented. I now created a similar implementation, it’s just a little smaller, supports escaping and doesn’t use an evil delimiter hack. It supports all of the ERB goodne...

Comment on A Simple, Lightweight JavaScript Templating Engine by Ivan

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 08:59:53 -0600

http://ajax-pages.sourceforge.net/

Comment on A Simple, Lightweight JavaScript Templating Engine by Mark Turansky

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:46:16 -0700

Looks good and I like your use of the familiar <% and %>, but concatenating that string template looks painful to me as a developer.

I wrote a similar JavaScript Template engine with JSP-like syntax where you can embed the template right in the page itself w/o having to concat a large string.

JavaScript Templates