goatee-js

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 |_______|                                        |_______|

A goatee is the perfect complement for handlebar mustaches. :-{>~

Meaning

For those who like acronyms:

Generic Object Action Template Execution Environment

Objective

First of all a citation from the originating “google-jstemplate” project:

Template processing is the staple pattern for separation of data and presentation in web applications. But it usually works on one page at a time, which is inadequate for incremental, asynchronous page updates typical of Ajax applications.

This system provides templates that allow for:

incremental processing: every processing operation produces valid output

differential processing: output text is again a template.

It also fixes other undesirable properties of standard template processing:

Wellformed output is guaranteed.

Escaped by default.

Templates are intelligible: input template is valid output.

And, of course:

Pure javascript, HTML, browser side processing.

That’s what goatee is all about. So what’s the difference between “goatee”, “google-jstemplate” or other similar projects like “knockout.js” then ?

The answer: My goals. I promise that “goatee” will have …

… html4, html5, xhtml 1.1 and xhtml5 flavours,
… an extremly modular architecture,
… an interpreter during development-phase, with quick’n’dirty instant updates,
… small and fast pre-compiled bytecode for production-releases,
… no external dependencies and no name collisions in browser environments with popular frameworks as jquery, underscore and so on,
… all the features of google-jstemplate,
… implementations for the following frameworks:
- Express.js (Node)
- Slim (PHP)
- Symfony (PHP)
- TYPO3 Flow (PHP)
- Django (Python)
- Rails (Ruby)
- Grails (Groovy)
- Play (Java/Scala)
… 100% compatiblity for all runtimes in all those different languages, producing exactly the same results, no matter if it runs on the client- side (browser) or on the server-side,
… content-management-extensions with the same look and feel as well as behaviour, no matter which implementation has been choosen and with versioning for all contents and assets,
… a very low learning curve, because it’s just javascript with css-philosophy combined. Which means you won’t have to learn a new syntax or grammar.

Installation

Goatee is not yet installable, but some components are …

Usage

Goatee is not yet useable, but some components are … see above.

Documentation

Read the annotated sources.

Development

Install dependencies:

Install project:

$ git clone https://github.com/sjorek/goatee.js
$ cd goatee-js
$ npm install

Run build in *nix-like environments:

$ PATH=$PATH:./node_modules/.bin cake all

Run build in Windows environments (not tested):

$ set path=%PATH%;.\node_modules\.bin
$ setx path "%PATH%"
$ cake all

Credits go to …

… Steffen Meschkat for meeting me in 2004 and sharing all his passion and knowledge about his (sadly proprietary) perl-based content-managment-system, which still is my main motivation behind this project.
… Google Inc. and all contributors of google-jstemplate (especially Steffen Meschkat) as a source of motivation and inspiration.
… Jeremy Ashkenas and all contributors of Coffee-Script.

goatee.js

A goatee is a perfect complement for handlebar mustaches.