stanlemon•net

Some conversation at work arose about templating in jQuery. The honest answer to anyone inquiring about this is that jQuery lacks any real good solution for simple macro-based templating. I was directed to Ext, which has a Template library in it that does exactly this. Subsequently, I've proposed to the UI folk a port of Ext.Template. For the most part the port is direct, the apply() and compile() methods are virtually identical to Ext.Template, though they use some jQuery functions instead of Ext.Core functions. The constructor is very different, and the designation of compiling is via a jQuery-style options object passed to the template constructor. I've tried to follow the jQuery.UI API as best as I know. I've changed the formatter usage in Ext.Template, as it depends on Ext.util.Format which isn't available in jQuery. All in all, this functionality does not seem like it's necessary so I changed it to use what I'm calling "helpers". These helpers provide the variable:method() syntax like in Ext.Template but allows the designer to customize what functions are available in a jQuery-style way.

Updated 03/12/2008: Anyhow, the code for my port and proposal is available here:
http://stanlemon.net/files/jquery.template.js