bristles

Handlebars helper bundle but with features to annoy the MVC and MVVM purists

Introduction

I have been using and abusing Handlebars with a lot of custom helpers for a long time. I decided to organise, formalise, and improve everything I have needed and might need. These helpers go beyond frontend stuff as I am working on a framework that relies heavily on templating and configuration so we have things for:

• templating and parsing JSON,
• assigning variables,
• invoking partials dynamically,
• more complex conditionals,
• switch/case and else if blocks,
• filtering and sorting arrays,
• mapping array items to any other helper, and
• much, much more

Every helper is designed to always return an expected type so as not to cause any problems. Many of these features go against the ideals behind mustache and handlebars which is cool. I totally get the reasoning behind getting your context sorted before rendering your views. This is more for weird templating as data processing/meta-programming work.

Development

This is still very much a work in progress and not really usable although the project is moving quickly and should reach a stable usable release in the coming weeks (written 2019-05-31).

Here are the goals for the project in terms of development:

• all helpers documented and with typedoc,
• robust tests for each helper that will be used to generate the "usage examples" in the docs,
• a playground to quickly test and get your head around how all this can be used,
• have a comprehensive but generic enough set of helpers that on-going work will be minimal bug fixing and optimisations, and
• slowly remove dependancies.

This README.md is really here to help me stake the claim of the name bristles while I get everything in order and finish off what is required for the first proper release. It will eventually resemble proper documentation.