jazz: node.js templates for humans

06 Jul 2010 jazz: node.js templates for humans

The use of bleeding-edge technology in the enterprise can be a daunting prospect. There are bugs to deal with, nuances to learn and third party libraries to overcome. Our team has been dealing with all of these issues over the past few months since one of our clients decided to use node for an upcoming project.

Node provides an event-driven JavaScript engine for the development of server-side applications. If the git logs are to be believed, the first commits to node were made on the 16th of February, 2009. That’s about a year and a half ago as I write this. As such, the surrounding community is still quite young. It’s this immaturity that has presented us with some of our biggest challenges while using node.

One early issue we ran into was template engines: it became apparent rather early on that our choice of template engines for node was somewhat limited. Although there are plenty of projects dedicated to delivering template engines for node, many are of a similar style: clones of HAML, cTemplate, ERB/EJS and a few other weird variants.

Our team started out using json-template, but found it cumbersome to structure our template data in the same way it was to be rendered (amongst other things). We then tried various other template engines and encountered similar issues. The nail in the coffin was that the client wasn’t too keen on the idea of using EJS or HAML style templates.

So we took matters into our own hands and churned out the initial version of jazz over the course of a few evenings.

Jazz is a simple, but powerful templating engine that compiles down to JavaScript at runtime. It supports many features expected of modern templating engines with simple syntax and there are plenty of examples of how to use it. Feedback from the client has been positive, with jazz “just working” where other template engines were causing grief.

Of course, this isn’t to say that there is something wrong with all existing template engines for node: many people on the node mailing list are happy with things like mustache.js and the many HAML-esque engines out there. Our needs/wants are just a little different to what is currently popular in the node community.

So if you’re using node and the more popular template engines weird you out, consider giving jazz a try. You can get the (GPLed) source code using the following git command:

$ git clone git://github.com/shinetech/jazz.git jazz

If you like jazz, please help us make it better! We’re always looking for patches, so drop me a line (thomas [dot] lee [at] shinetech.com) with any improvements.