hogan.js precompiler for client side vanillaJS templates

Inspired by templatizer and built on top of hogan.js

Hoganizer precompiles mustache templates in to vanillaJS javascript functions so they render blazingly fast on the client side. This renders your app way faster because:

• Hoganizer parses the templates way before they are shipped to the client, remember that parsing is always the most time consuming operation in template land.
• Hoganizer outputs vanillaJS functions that only need the small template renderer from Hogan.js, this means you are not sending the whole hogan.js template engine over the wire, but only bare javascript functions and a small template wrapper.

When you are doing client side templating but want to speed up your template parsing on the frontend, Hoganizer is for you! You can use Hoganizer to compile all templates and output to a file or as a string. If you are writing mustache templates which you want to render on the backend (using express for example) this is not for you.

var Hoganizer = require('hoganizer');
var hoganizer = new Hoganizer({
    templateDir: './templates',
    extension: '.mustache',
    writeLocation: './templates.js'
});

// Compile all mustache templates in `./templates` and write
// them into frontend js file to `./templates.js`.
hoganizer.write();

// Compile but save the script as a string
var vanillaJS = hoganizer.precompile();

// Grab the latest compiled version
var vanillaJS = hoganizer.getCached();

If you are working on frontend javascript website you can put all mustache templates in a templates folder and use Hoganizer to precompile the whole folder into a single vanillaJS file.

Create a file called home.mustache inside templates:

I am <em>{{name}}</em>, I like {{hobby}}!

<script src='templates.js'></script>

var NameOfTemplate = 'home';
var parameters = {name: 'Hulk', hobby: 'wrestling' };

var renderedTemplate = templates[NameOfTemplate].render(parameters);
// -> 'I am <em>Hulk</em>, I like Wrestling!';
$('body').html(renderedTemplate);

Run hoganizer.write(); to create compiled functions and save them into templates.js, a static file which you can serve through a normal webserver.

To squeeze out the best performance, I recommend JS minifying the resulting templates.js (and for example concatenating it with the rest of your frontend JS) as well as HTML minifying the mustache files before they are written to vanillaJS by the write method (because after this process JS minifiers do not touch compiled JS strings).

Warning: don't use the precompile & write methods on a in production running nodejs webserver. They use sync fs methods and thus block your whole node server!

You can route your dev environment through an express server for example and you can serve all static files normally but generate templates on the fly for requests to templates.js. This way you can keep editting the templates in the templates folder and on every refresh you get the latest version served.

var express = require('express');
var app = express();

app.configure(function(){
    app.use(app.router);
    app.use(express.errorHandler({dumpExceptions:true, showStack:true}));
    // serve all files out of the folder `static`
    app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/static'));
});
var port = 1337;
app.listen(port);
// browse to localhost:1337

And you can catch all calls to /templates.js and serve a fresh version of your compiled templates.

var Hoganizer = require('hoganizer');
var hoganizer = new Hoganizer();
app.get("/templates.js",  function(req, res) {
    res.contentType(".js");
    res.send(hoganizer.precompile());
});