I've had a little utility that I've been kicking around for some time now that I've found to be quite useful in my JavaScript application-building endeavors. It's a super-simple templating function that is fast, caches quickly, and is easy to use. I have a couple tricks that I use to make it real fun to mess with.
Here's the source code to the templating function (a more-refined version of this code will be in my upcoming book Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja):
You would use it against templates written like this (it doesn't have to be in this particular manner - but it's a style that I enjoy):
You can also inline script:
Quick tip: Embedding scripts in your page that have a unknown content-type (such is the case here - the browser doesn't know how to execute a text/html script) are simply ignored by the browser - and by search engines and screenreaders. It's a perfect cloaking device for sneaking templates into your page. I like to use this technique for quick-and-dirty cases where I just need a little template or two on the page and want something light and fast.
and you would use it from script like so:
You could pre-compile the results for later use. If you call the templating function with only an ID (or a template code) then it'll return a pre-compiled function that you can execute later:
The biggest falling-down of the method, at this point, is the parsing/conversion code - it could probably use a little love. It does use one technique that I enjoy, though: If you're searching and replacing through a string with a static search and a static replace it's faster to perform the action with .split("match").join("replace")
- which seems counter-intuitive but it manages to work that way in most modern browsers. (There are changes going in place to grossly improve the performance of .replace(/match/g, "replace")
in the next version of Firefox - so the previous statement won't be the case for long.)
Feel free to have fun with it - I'd be very curious to see what mutations occur with the script. Since it's so simple it seems like there's a lot that can still be done with it.