Why Mustache is for WIN

Mustache is a logic-less templating language. By being lacking in logic, it easily enables cross-language template interpretation. This is important for two reasons.

• It protects work in constructing good DOM. This is true for many template languages, but it makes sure the assets are protected from language change.
• By enabling templates to work in multiple languages, you enable it to work it multiple contexts. For instance, if you have a search feature that you would like ajaxified, then you can work towards producing a JSON object. For SEO, you use the template to send off the HTML. For Ajax, you can just get the JSON object and do the JSON to HTML in the browser. Generally, JSON is more efficient to send over the wire when compared to HTML; ergo, you get a snappier response in addition to faster development time (by only writing one template and not worrying about DOM manipulation).

When I approached Mustache, I was hesitant at first since I do not do much front-end engineering. I wondered what it can't do, and I've looked for counter-examples. Simply put, I can do amazing things with mustache. So can you.

The key is to think of Mustache as just a simple HTML encoder over a giant JSON represention of the module, page, layout, etc. You will put in some silly things in the JSON, but in the end it will enable something very powerful in you architect around getting a giant a JSON object back.

Namely, it is very easy to automate testing on giant JSON files. That is, it is easier to script against JSON than junk HTML. For me and WIN, this is a fairly important question as I would like to be able to crawl my entire projects to look for errors.