I started working with JavaScriptTemplates after finding that jtemplates really let me down on performance on a long template (it was taking about 2.5s to load, JST topped at 200ms).

Just to give you a flavor for how it works, I’ll outline how I used it. To start, I created a JSON data file – typically this would be fed by a web service, but for getting up and running, a file is easy.

userdata.json:
{ users : [
{ name: "John Doe", email: "john.doe@nthread.com"},
{ name: "Jane Doe", email: "jane.doe@nthread.com"}
] }

Then I created a really basic web page. The page had a div where the templated HTML would be placed:

<div id=’userlist’ ></div>

And imported the jQuery & JST scripts in the header:

<script src=”scripts/jquery.min.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script src=”scripts/trimpath-template.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

Next, I created the template, which needs to be placed in a textarea. All of the templating libraries I have seen use a textarea for this, probably because it is the only place on a web page where you can avoid the browser parsing the HTML into DOM elements (which leads to escaping):

<textarea id='userlist_template' style='display:none' >
 <ul>
 {for user in users}
 <li><a href='mailto:${user.email}' >${user.name}</a></li>
 {/for}
</ul>
</textarea>

Finally, a small piece of JST & jQuery is used to load the JSON file in process it through the template:

<script type="text/javascript" >
 $(document).ready(function() {
  var data = $.getJSON("users.json", null, showData);
 });
 function showData(data) {
     var userlistTemplate = TrimPath.parseDOMTemplate("userlist_template");
     $("#userlist").html(userlistTemplate.process(data));
 }
</script>

That’s really all there is to it. This prints out the fairly unexciting:

User List

• John Doe
• Jane Doe

It really is pretty cool though, try it out.