CodeBistro: lean software development

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  Sasha O 12:53 pm on 2012-01-29 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Java ( 4 ), templates, variable substitution, Web   

  Bristle template: when you don’t have time to do your Moustache 

  Usually I generate my pages with Velocity. Recently I had a project where even implementing Velocity was not worth the time. I tried both MessageFormatter and StringTemplates and both had problems with some portion of HTML/Javascript markup.

  So I did what we, engineers always do in this situation: run your own. Good news, it took just over an hour and I ended with a single very small file. It  can only variable substitution but that was enough for me. Here it is:

  http://codebistro.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/misc/src/main/java/org/codebistro/util/BristleTemplate.java

  The best part: it has no dependencies so you can just copy file into your project and template away.

  Of course you can Maven just as well:

      <repositories>
          ...
          <repository>
              <id>codebistro-open</id>
              <name>codebistro-open repo</name>
              <layout>default</layout>
              <url>http://codebistro.googlecode.com/svn/repo/</url&gt;
          </repository>
          ...
      </repositories>
      ...
      <dependencies>
          ...
          <dependency>
              <groupId>org.codebistro.util</groupId>
              <artifactId>misc</artifactId>
              <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
          </dependency>
       <dependencies>

  Microframeworks are popular these days. This thing doesn’t even qualify to be called micro- or even nano- but I got a feeling I am going to use Bristle template in the future…
   

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  codebistro 5:41 am on 2008-12-23 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Development, Web   

  The AHAH! Moment 

  By my faith! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing anything about it, and I am much obliged to you for having taught me that.

  Molière

  We have been doing AHAH for a few months and now I know! The thing definitely makes sense, especially as the app gets more complicated and every bit of code shaved off the client side saves us a bit of our lives.

  The performance still requires investigation. For now I assume that transparent gzip compression can make HTML snippets just about as small as compressed JSON responses.

  codebistro, Anton, Sasha Ovsankin and one other person are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Burton 11:56 pm on 2010-03-09 Permalink | Reply

    codeibstro.com, how do you do it?

  • 

    Sasha Ovsankin 10:53 am on 2010-03-11 Permalink | Reply

    Well the main advantage here to avoid duplication (DRY). Imagine a web page which is both rendered by the server (for SEO) as well as dynamically, via AJAX. Something like Twitter. If you do the AJAX rendering the usual way — get the data via JSON and then “dress it up” into HTML, you end up with 2 totally different pieces of rendering code which should be synchronized, a headache.

    Using AHAH, you render both of them using the same code on the server side, transfer the rendered piece via AJAX and then the client-side JavaScript would only stick it at a proper place in DOM. Makes sense?

    However since the time of this post things changed a bit: the HTML has become more “semantic” so the rendering magic shifted to CSS which can be safely reused by both sides. Also, we made some sort of browser-side templates: we put template in HTML with “display:none”, then for rendering we copy it, populate and make it visible. Still a bit of duplication but not really a big problem. So AHAH is not used that much any more.

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    Anton 6:40 pm on 2010-06-28 Permalink | Reply

    wikipedia link got deleted, that one worked fine for me

    http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/ahah

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      codebistro 11:29 pm on 2010-06-28 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks, fixed the enry