jQuery templating engines

Check out Rick Strahl's post Client Templating with jQuery. He explores jTemplates, but then makes a better case for John Resig's micro-templating solution, even improving it some. Good comparisons, lots of samples.

jQuery Nano:

Template Engine

Basic Usage

Assuming you have following JSON response:

data = {
  user: {
    login: "tomek",
    first_name: "Thomas",
    last_name: "Mazur",
    account: {
      status: "active",
      expires_at: "2009-12-31"
    }
  }
}

you can make:

nano("<p>Hello {user.first_name} {user.last_name}! Your account is <strong>{user.account.status}</strong></p>", data)

and you get ready string:

<p>Hello Thomas Mazur! Your account is <strong>active</strong></p>

Test page...

Not sure how it handles your specific problem, but there's also the PURE template engine.

This isn't jsquery specific, but here's a JS-based templating library released by google as open source:

http://code.google.com/p/google-jstemplate/

This allows using DOM elements as templates, and is re-entrant (in that the output of a template rendering is still a template that can be re-rendered with a different data model).

John Resig has one that's he's posted on his blog. http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/

If you're working in the .NET Framework 2.0/3.5, you should take a look at JBST as implemented by http://JsonFx.net. It has a client-side templating solution that has familiar JSP/ASP syntax but is precompiled at build-time for compact cache-able templates that don't need to be parsed at runtime. It works well with jQuery and other JavaScript libraries as the templates themselves are compiled to pure JavaScript.