A template engine allows you to utilize static template files in your projects or applications, then replaces variables and instances declared in a template file with actual values at runtime.
Templates engines are often available in multiple languages with a different syntax, but with a similar philosophy, and having following common features:
- May or may not allow you to write arbitrary Javascript inside templates
- Asynchronous template loading, rendering, and streaming
- Can generate any number of formats like HTML, Markdown, JSON, or YAML.
- Composable templates
Pure template engine works well if you want to allow people to write templates for rendering HTML-pages, e-mails or markdown files. It has no built-in support for event-handling, accessing backend-services or incremental DOM updates.
If you want to build a single-page application and you want to handle user-input, you should probably look for a framework like React, Vue, or Angular.
- Handlebars - A simple templating language that uses a template and an input object to generate HTML or other text formats. Handlebars compiles templates into JavaScript functions, this makes the template execution faster than most other template engines.
- Mustache.js - Minimal templating with
{{mustaches}} in JavaScript, a zero-dependency implementation of the mustache template system in JavaScript. It can be used for HTML, config files, source code - anything. It works by expanding tags in a template using values provided in a hash or object.
- Pug - Formerly known as “Jade”, a high-performance template engine heavily influenced by Haml and implemented with JavaScript for Node.js and browsers.
- EJS - A simple templating language that lets you generate HTML markup with plain JavaScript. No religiousness about how to organize things. No reinvention of iteration and control-flow. It’s just plain JavaScript.
- Dust.js - A Javascript templating engine. It inherits its look from the ctemplate family of languages, and is designed to run asynchronously on both the server and the browser.