beaufortfrancois / templates

Motemplate templates

Motemplate is a mostly-logicless data-binding templating language, initially inspired by mustache and ctemplate but with stronger data-binding and logic primitives.

The goal of Motemplate is to provide high quality templates across the whole stack of a web application. Write templates once, statically render content on the Java/Python/node server, then as content is added, dynamically render it using the same templates on the JavaScript client. This means:

• Minimal logic (not logic-less but pretty dumb).
• Powerful data-binding primitives.

The reference implementation of Motemplate is written in Python. The other platforms (Java and JavaScript) lag quite far behind - not only are they missing newer features, but they haven't even been renamed to Motemplate yet.

Overview

A template is text plus {{/}}-style markup, for example,

<h1>Party shopping list</h1>
<ul>
{{#guest:guests}}
  <li>{{guest.name}} - {{guest.favorites.food}}
  {{?guest.favourites.color}}
  <li>{{guest.name}} - {{guest.favorites.color}}
  {{/guest.favourites.color}}
{{/guests}}
</ul>

...

{
  "guests": [{
    "name": "Ben",
    "favorites": {
      "food": "Spaghetti",
      "color": "Blue"
    }
  },{
    "name": "Fred",
    "favorites": {
      "food": "Penne"
    }
  }]
}

A template is rendered by passing it object data. The types vary per implementation:

• Python uses any object which declares a get() method - such as dicts.
• Java reflects over properties and maps.
• JavaScript uses objects.

The End

Unfortunately, that's all the documentation for now. I haven't had time to keep it up to date with the development needed to support Chromium's Docserver, so I've deleted it, but you can attempt to glance at the templates in Chromium (especially these) and the test cases in this repository.