Amulet tut

gistfile1.txt

Hi,

There are a few tests for amulet, yes.
In the tests/ directory, run these:
  
  node spec_test.js --ignore-whitespace
  node spec_test.js --ignore-whitespace --extended

I use amulet in a couple of production cases.

One big thing that amulet doesn't have is following the Mu spec for whitespace. But whitespace is rarely important in HTML, which is why I haven't worried about it that much.

Amulet is not a benchmark-driven-developed product. It's probably slower than Mu for basic 'hello world' examples. But it supports yields (layout hierarchies) naturally (without partials on each side -- which is just about as ugly as php), and it can wait for context variables and even layout-yielded template names. It's more in line with the Node.js async mentality than any other template engine I've come across. In one app I assign every user a ticket as soon as they hit the page. But I render/send off 95% of the page before I make the various database calls to check if their existing ticket is recognized, or assign them a new one, and then slip that in a <script> just before the </body> end tag, where amulet has been waiting.

To be honest, I just develop it when I need it to work for my projects, so it doesn't have extensive tests to back it up. And it has some extraneous (but I think they're cool and useful) things, like sections that assign into variables, being able to section-iterate over lists of primitive object by using "_", pipes (so you can say something like {{user_details || JSON.stringify}} ).

I'd say give it a shot. I think I'm pretty settled on most of the public-facing methods, but those do change sometimes. And if you find any gaping holes, let me know, and I'll try to fix them.

My headers look kind of like this:

  var amulet = require('amulet');  
  amulet.root(path.join(__dirname, 'templates'));

This will throw errors if any of your templates (*.mu) have parsing errors.

Then later, call:

  // synchronous (res is your http server's response argument, context is some possible empty object, {})
  amulet.render(['layout.mu', 'results.mu'], context, res);

  // async 
  var renderer = amulet.init(res).start('layout.mu', context);
  // go do something
  renderer.extendTemplateStack('annotate.mu');
  // or
  renderer.extendContext({user: user, ticket: ticket});
  // and then make sure to run
  renderer.force();
  // before you let the renderer go out of scope (force makes it sync -- so it'll finish rendering the templates whether or not you have the appropriate fields in your context)
  // also, each of those are methods are chainable.

The best place to look at what tags are supported is in 'scanMustache: function' in lib/parsing.js . There is some cool/unstable/non-standard stuff in there. A lot more than the Mu spec calls for.

I'll probably extend this message into a wiki "Getting started" page, or add it to the readme.

Good luck,

-c