Yesterday I was introduced to Hogan.js the templating library from twitter. It was new to me so I had a look at the documentation and I think I know when I would use it.
And when I would not.
The javascript templating engine of my choice so far has been ICanHaz.js. It’s implements mustache syntax for the templates which can be described as a kind of standard and it’s small and fast and jQuery/zepto.js compatible.
If I was to work on a Symfony or Silex I would try out twig.js instead as it features the same template syntax as the name giving PHP templating engine feature in the before mentioned frameworks.
So what can I read from the Hogan.js documentation?
It is of similar size as ICanHaz.js (about 2.3-2.5kb) and it uses the mustache syntax as well. Judged from that alone they seem almost identical.
But they’re not.
Hogan.js compiles its templates into javascript before use. Which probably accelerates the client-side execution. But it also means that the compilation has to take place on the server to make sense and as the compilation is taken care of by Hogan.js as well we are talking about server-side javascript execution like node.js.
This is perfectly fine of course if you’re working with node.js or similar anyway but I wouldn’t recommend it for use with other languages like PHP, Ruby or Java as it would increase your complexity a lot and you would probably have to introduce a lot of business logic duplication.
But if you’re working in an all javascript environment I reckon Hogan.js would be perfect fit.