The page below explains why we developed PURE a templating engine for Javascript. PURE is ultra-fast and binds JSON data with clean HTML(no special syntax or logic required).
In 2008, we started the development of our web application BeeBole Timesheet.
Of course we had to make several important choices for our IT architecture.
We started by choosing a light, flexible and really fast back-end : Erlang
For the front-end, we wanted the browser to be the center for rendering and aggregating services. (Read our post about True Aggregation, the Browser as a Platform).
To achieve this goal, we had to decide for:
We chose jQuery as our JS library (the reasons of this choice will be detailed in a future post).
We decided to go for JSON as the preferred communication language between the browser and Erlang.
The main reason being:
JSON is JavaScript, and JavaScript is THE language of the browser that runs the client logic.
When an AJAX kind of call returns a JSON, your JavaScript code understands it natively.
When an XML is returned, in some ways, you have to convert it fully or partially to JavaScript variables. Then the data becomes useful in your browser. This remains true even if you use XSLT for the rendering.
Don't get me wrong. It doesn't mean that we are closing the door on XML and that we won't aggregate XML services from other API's in our solutions. It took almost 10 years for the IT Industry to replace ASCII files with XML. And nowadays, you can find plenty of API's working with XML. So XML is here to stay.
But receiving JSON data in a browser simplifies the developer's life dramatically.
For years, although very unpopular amongst developers, we really enjoyed XSLT to render XML.
Granted, it's exponentially verbose and it takes a while to be comfortable with both the clunky syntax and the pattern programming.
However it's amazingly powerful and its rendering speed is impressive, especially in IE.
Now, with JSON as communication language, we had to find a JavaScript equivalent to XSLT.
We first came across the <%..%> family of templating tools: ajax-pages, EJS, trimpath, Tenjin, ...
We liked the "JS/HTML only" approach but not the use of the imperative kind of <%..%> tags and programming.
At the same time, we started to build a template engine. We first tried a version that was DOM based and which was so heavily inspired by XSLT that we called it JSL ;)
But in the end, it was a disaster in terms of performance. Only Safari 3 on Mac had a decent rendering speed, but still too slow for our planned usage. IE was by far the slowest.
Then we discovered Jemplate. We liked the functional richness (inherited from TT2), the blazing speed and the idea of a compilation of the template to a JS function.
What we didn't like, was having to install Perl to build templates, and the [%..%] tags either.
We wiped out JSL from our git repository and decided to go for Jemplate.
But the same week I saw a post about templating on Mootools by Zoltan Vrana. Then a comment drove me to Mario Valente's blog. He was detailing other existing approaches and was sending this message in a bottle:
To sum it up, what I would really like is a JavaScript implementation of Meld.
It blew my mind!
I read about Meld and pyMeld. Not being a Python expert, I stopped quickly but it was too late... I was convinced that building an unobtrusive rendering tool was possible. And why not... in JavaScript!
Our wish list for a template engine was as follows:
After some more research, we didn't find anything like that. So we turned our wish list into a reality by building PURE, standing for PURE Unobtrusive Rendering Engine.
Past the excitement of finding such a nice acronym, we discovered that it was a totally new way of building web pages.
The main surprise is that there are no real templates anymore. And no template language either.
With PURE, we can start from any HTML page and transform or make dynamic some parts of it just with some JavaScript directives.
But then, any HTML portion of this modified page can be reused as a source for a new rendering, and so on.
This ability to dynamically generate new templates on the fly, radically changes our way of building web interfaces and the HTML rendering in general.
As we thought it might help and inspire others, we decided to document it and make it Open Source.
And here are various links of the PURE project:
And if you end up liking PURE, the best you can do for the project is to promote this post by clicking on the Share button hereunder and promoting it on your favorite social bookmarking.
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