Still not quite sure what your objective is, but there is something that might solve whatever your real world problem is: Flash MX Pro (No doubt lots of people on the list don't like it any more than I do, but it still has its place and its good points).
It uses javascript (well it is based on ECMAscript which is what javascript is based on - renamed to actionscript and now implements the new class extensions which are great), which is an easy language to use.
It can make asynchronous calls back to a server to receive images, flash movies, text, encoded value lists or XML (all of which TT could generate).
Essentially you can build a whole application in flash (particularly using the new forms) which gets downloaded to the browser once and then requests back to the server when it needs new info - minimising the load on the server (as only data is exchanged once loaded - formatting that data is left to your javascript running inside flash).
The real downside to using this method is the time taken to build a flash application is significantly longer than a normal html / serverside TT or similar method. Also interface changes take much longer in flash although sometimes it can look better. There is generally a less good separation between the layers of an application - data, presentation, navigation, with the last two inextricably muddled which is what really slows development down.
The advantages are smaller load on the server, no flicker between pages loading, every time you update a value you don't immediately have to return to the server with it and if you do it can be done asynchronously and not interrupt the user experience. This means you can handle the user experience much better than web pages where there is nothing you can really do during the web page load wait.
Having said all that, I can say from experience I can reproduce almost anything flash can do in html and javascript (DHTML) with a good percentage of things being easier (i.e. except really complex animations and vector transforms). So I agree with the people asking why do you want TT in javascript when you have a perfectly good DOM in all the major browsers?
In practice I have developed systems using various server side technologies (TT, ColdFusion, ASP) and used both DHTML and FLASH for front ends. Flash is particularly good for kiosk type apps, where you want it to sit around for ages doing something pretty and only asking the server for new data when such is required - i.e. where it is all about user experience. DHTML is better when time is an issue and you want an application up and running and easy to update, fix and expand upon when your requirements change. Flash is very hard to work with in an OO / modular way and consequently you don't get lots of reuse (particularly graphical stuff, code is easier to reuse if you use classes) - so when requirements change you often bin half a project. OO can be done in flash, it is just so difficult to do well most people don't do it fully. By comparison with web pages, you might lose a whole web page but that has no affect on any other page (usually) as they were all made separately in the first place and not interdependent like Flash (which has no real concept of pages, the nearest thing being the new forms). Flash is also best a liner(ish) things and not so good at things where you can jump around in any sequence, forms overcome this to an extent
So if you really want a client side thing capable of doing clever stuff using Javascript and want to avoid XML transforms, DHTML and Flash are two of the best ways of doing it, I don't think there is a need for anything like TT.
Hope that helps and wasn't too long winded :-) Simon
At 09:17 31/03/2005, you wrote:
I'm looking for a tool that works pretty much exactly like template toolkit, but is implemented in javascript so the transform occurs on the client's machine. it may work this way: a javascript hash (just like the perl hash) is given to the template object along with a string containing template code (or perhaps an id referring to the element containing the template code). the template object then does the transform and returns that processed block (and puts it in another block... the same block whatever.... you get the idea)
- i'm going out on a limb here, but, do you think it would be reasonable to implement the TT parsing engine in javascript? since the answer is obviously no, it's unreasonable, does anybody know of anything akin to this?
(and i don't want to hear anything about xsl - xsl is a decent templating language for xml, NOT html and it doesn't work - i want a friendly syntax like this.)
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