The jQuery templates proposal makes me really excited. I love jTemplates and all, but support seems sparse. And I know other cool alternatives - for jQuery and for other libraries, as well as homegrown solutions - exist. But jQuery is what I use at work and so I'm happy templates are being considered for addition. I'm hopeful that this will result in a rock solid implementation and some really cool extensions.
I already switched the jTemplates stuff in my work project over to the latest branch of jquery-tmpl, and thought I'd add it to the front page of this site, too. It's sort of a weird application, because the front page data is static and doesn't really need templates. As a matter of fact, the one thing it did need, jquery-tmpl (someone please correct me if I'm calling it the wrong thing) doesn't include. However, with a minor modification, I was able to get it to do what I needed, and have the currently static markup already parsed as a template so that in the future I can easily make it more dynamic.
The changes I wanted to make involved loading each frame of the animation/paper doll thing on the front page on demand, instead of having them all there in the page when it loads. This is part one in a two-part attempt to make it not run like total shit on mobile. I moved all the extra frames off into their own pages, and could easily at that point have just gotten them one by one with $.get(). But, as mentioned, I wanted to load them as templates for flexibility down the line (ex: translations, because many people in many nations are interested in my hobbies and my dog and cat). So I did this:
$.extend({
tmplFromUrl: function( url, data, callback, options, parentItem ) {
$.get(url,function(response) {
var tmpl = $.tmpl(response, data, options, parentItem);
callback(tmpl);
});
}
});
Called like this:
$.tmplFromUrl(url, null, function(tmpl) {
nextPage = tmpl.appendTo(container);
garanndotcom.flipPages(currentPage,nextPage);
});
Even though that's totally boneheaded for this particular application, the ability to load data from an external file is something I'm really hoping they add. I never used it in my big jTemplates application (cause every page was one big template), but it was something I was hoping to use on my current work project. I don't mind using my own goofy plugins to get the same effect, but I doubt I'll be the only person to ever want this and it seems silly to have a bunch of different people writing a bunch of different code that's probably going to amount to less than ten lines apiece. Maybe there's a good reason they don't want to add it (security seems like it might be one) - I haven't made it to the bottom of the discussion thread about templates yet. Personally, I'm hopeful that they just haven't gotten around to it yet.