Mustache (template system)

Mustache (template system)
Initial release 2009 (2009)
License MIT
Website mustache.github.io

Mustache is a simple web template system with implementations available for ActionScript, C++, Clojure, CoffeeScript, ColdFusion, D, Delphi, Erlang, Fantom, Go, Haskell, Io, Java, JavaScript, Julia, Lua, .NET, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Pharo, Python, Racket, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Swift, CFEngine and XQuery.

Mustache is described as a "logic-less" system because it lacks any explicit control flow statements, like if and else conditionals or for loops; however, both looping and conditional evaluation can be achieved using section tags processing lists and lambdas.

It is named "Mustache" because of heavy use of curly braces ,{ }, that resemble a sideways moustache.

Mustache is used mainly for mobile and web applications.[1][2]

History and principles

Mustache-1 was inspired by ctemplate and et,[3] and started as a GitHub distribution at the end of 2009. A first version of the template engine was implemented with Ruby, running YAML template texts. The (preserved) main principles were:

The input data can be a class, so input data can be characterized as an MVC-view. The Mustache template does nothing but reference methods in the (input data) view.[3] All the logic, decisions, and code is contained in this view, and all the markup (ex. output XML) is contained in the template. In an MVP context: input data is from MVP-presenter, and the Mustache template is the MVP-view.

Examples

The simplest template:

Hello {{name}}

Template with section tag:

{{#x}}
Some text
{{/x}}

Here, when x is a Boolean value then the section tag acts like an if conditional, but when x is an array then it acts like a foreach loop.

Template that is not escaped:

{{&body}}

Here, if body contains HTML, it won't be escaped.

Technical details

Syntax highlighting is available in Vim, Emacs,[4] TextMate, Coda and Atom.

The Mustache templates support is built into many web application frameworks (ex. CakePHP). The support in JavaScript includes both client-side programming with many popular JavaScript libraries and Ajax frameworks like jQuery, Dojo and YUI, as well as server-side JavaScript using Node.js and CommonJS.

Specification and implementations

There are many Mustache Engine implementations available, and all of them meet a common specification (see external links) that for final users results in the common syntax. The last SPEC_VERSION is 1.1.2.

All Mustache Engines, in the v1.X architecture, have a render method, a Mustache_Compiler class and a Parser class.

References

  1. "Smashing Mobile Web Development", G. Avola and J. Raasch, 2012. ISBN 9781118348123.
  2. "Functional Programming Applied to Web Development Templates", J. Cady, 2011. MS Project Report.
  3. 1 2 https://github.com/defunkt/mustache/blob/master/README.md
  4. http://web-mode.org

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Friday, March 25, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.