Faster, easier, better interactive web development
You've probably seen this kind of thing in JavaScript apps:
template = '<p>Hello {{name}}!</p>';
data = { name: 'world' };
element.innerHTML = render( template, data ); // '<p>Hello world!</p>'
That's great, but what happens when name changes? Typically, you would have a view with a render method that re-created the HTML with the new data, then either updated innerHTML, or did the jQuery/Zepto/Ender equivalent.
In other words, we just threw away a perfectly good p element! Depending on the complexity of your template, that can mean a lot of work for the browser, as that element now has to be garbage collected. Unless your user is in an older browser, in which case they may suffer memory leaks instead.
Of course, rather than doing the quick-at-first-but-wasteful-thereafter innerHTML thing, you might prefer manual DOM manipulation:
<p>Hello <span id='name'></span>!</p>
$('#name').text( currentName );
But that's no solution. You've added needless complexity to your DOM structure (bad for performance) and made your template more verbose and harder to reason about. And worst of all, you've swapped extra work for the browser with extra work for yourself.
There is a better way. Here's a basic Ractive.js setup:
view = new Ractive({
el: element,
template: '<p>Hello {{name}}!</p>',
data: { name: world }
});
// renders <p>Hello world!</p> to our container element
view.set( 'name', 'Jim' );
// changes 'world' to 'Jim', leaves everything else untouched
When Ractive.js renders the template, it stores references to the bits that contain dynamic data – splitting up text nodes if necessary – and updates them when the data changes. It's quicker than el.innerHTML (or $(el).html()), and doesn't suffer from the many drawbacks of manual DOM manipulation.
You're right – we've already got perfectly good tools for keeping views in sync with their models. We've got frameworks like Ember.js and Angular.js, made by brilliant developers and used in successful apps. I'd certainly recommend trying them.
A lot of the time, though, you don't need the functionality of mega-frameworks, or the extra kilobytes (and learning curve) that go with them. And if you stray from the 'happy path' of anticipated use cases, be prepared to hack your way to a solution. Some developers become sceptical of the magic that goes on under the hood – if you can't understand it, you can't fix it when it goes wrong.
Knockout.js also deserves a special mention, for popularising the idea of declarative data binding in web apps, and doing so with a cracking library. Ractive.js is indebted to Knockout, from where it takes much inspiration.
But mustache syntax is arguably much nicer to deal with, and your non-developer colleagues can easily understand it.
Ractive.js aims to combine beautiful syntax with a simple API, miniscule footprint, and best-in-class performance.
Ractive.js complies with the mustache spec as closely as possible. If you know mustache, you're good to go. (And if you don't, you can learn it in under 5 minutes.) That means:
{{user.info.name.first}}<div>{{{contents}}}</div>{{#gameover}}<p>Game over man, game over!</p>{{/gameover}}<ul>{{#users}}<li>{{name}} - {{company}}</li>{{/users}}</ul><%= old_school %>{{#basket}}<div>{{>item}}</div>{{/basket}}<div style='color: {{prefs.color}};'></div>There's more!
Take a look at the tutorials to see how Ractive.js can make your life as a web developer easier, then read the API docs.
This project is in the early stages of development, though I've used it regularly in production code in my day job. YMMV! But if you end up using the library I'd love to hear from you – I'm @rich_harris.
Bug reports and issues are very welcome, as are pull requests. If you run into problems, I'll do my best to help.
Released under the MIT license.
0.3.0
2013-05-27
FAQs
Next-generation DOM manipulation
The npm package ractive receives a total of 6,775 weekly downloads. As such, ractive popularity was classified as popular.
We found that ractive demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 4 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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