Ramadan..

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It is time for Ramadan again (the month of fasting for us Muslims). I hardly can find time to blog because of the many things to do. I hope I will be back in shape soon. Happy Ramadan to Muslims every where. Happy Ramadan to humanity.

JSTemplates

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Our code base became largely infested with lots of JSTemplates (Javascript templates from trimpath.com) . We are using them for almost all view rendering now. JSTemplates are great but there are certain areas where they keep you wanting more. I'll try to put those issues into prespective here:
  • No remote includes!
    It would be great if one could just include a url in a template. But how could this be done? and the latency? these are questions that arise when speaking about such a feature
  • InnerHTML based!
    since they always return a string representing the rendred template the only reasonable way to use it is to set it as the innerhtml of some html node in your document. While this is a normal practice it has some drawbacks!
    • once you set the inner html of an object the control is immediately returned before the content is actually parsed and added to the dom tree
    • so if you want to access an element just after the template was rendered you might find it not yet available as a dom node!
    • While every benchmark on that issue says that setting innerhtml is the fastest thing on earth I believe that dom manipulation is much faster (the benchmarks count only the time needed to create the string and assign it to the node, not the parsing and rendering time!)
So here we have them! only two issues :)

The first is really not that important. It is the second one that bugs me! I think one solution would be to parse the rendered template yourself and create the nodes as you go and after you finish you append them to the container. But this would be much slower than the browser's implementation! An alternative would be an event that fires when the browser finishes the rendering! would that be possible? I think it could be done one way or another (like every render function returns a unique id of an object it appends to the end of the template. This is looked for on a timeout or interval method which would fire some callback if it is found).

Just some thoughts. Aside from that JSTemplates are ultra cool!