CoffeeScript, 2nd Edition

Building the Page with Templates

Nothing is more fundamental to a web application than how it generates the HTML that ultimately tells the browser what to display, and nothing generates more heated arguments among web application developers. A bevy of templating libraries allow empty shells of HTML to be filled with specific content, ranging from the trivial (Underscore.js’s _.template function) to the extravagant (React.js/JSX). Even the choice between generating HTML on the server or on the client is wrought with controversy: client-side rendering is sleek, but server-side rendering is enormously flexible, as it can handle an unlimited number of special cases (personalization, internationalization, errors, and security checks...) without passing ...