Which hogan.js templeting package to use with express.js? - node.js

The hogan.js template package that express provide is hjs, however, that package last update was a year ago, and the repo at github got issues opened also a year ago (though not really crucial ones).
There also seems to be more than one hogan.js package for express tempting at npm which left me confused!

If you see hjs source code, it's only 63 or so lines and it require hogan.js to work, so it's just a wrapper to make it work on express.
The one I used is hogan-express which is also a wrapper for hogan.js (it's required in package.json) and it's no more than 150.
My point, to try to clarify things, it's that the important module is hogan.js all the rest modules to integrate in express are just wrappers. I believe is also worth to give a try to the consolidate module which also support Hogan.
By looking to githubs stars (not necesarily quality indicator) you will see
consolidate (*548) > express-hogan(*48) > hjs (*8)
If you are wondering why hjs was the "chosen" for the express command line the answer is this pull request You can see by your self what it takes to implement another module. So may be some one should report if hjs is giving problems and there is a better alternative. It's not hard to change it in express.

Related

Grunt still unable to handle ES6 imports?

I am working on a project under NodeJS that uses ES6 imports/exports (hence having set type: module in its package.json) and want to automate some tasks using Grunt. Now, I absolutely love grunt, but it appears to me that even in 2022 it is still not able to work nicely with ES6 modules? I always get an error saying "require() of ES Module /vagrant/Gruntfile.js from /vagrant/node_modules/grunt/lib/grunt/task.js not supported."
I understand where this is coming from, and I do understand there are workaround options - in particular, renaming Gruntfile.js to Gruntfile.cjs and passing it to grunt with the --gruntfile command line option. But that is incredibly annoying - it makes the command six times as long as it would be if I could just run grunt and be done with it. Pretty much the same goes for transpiling with something like Babel: That is exactly the kind of thing grunt is intended to handle in the first place, so it feels a bit like the horse riding the jockey. I feel like this should "just work".
Am I missing something here, or is grunt really unable to handle ES6 imports out of the box?
Actually, looking at the grunt github page it appears that a recent commit has addressed it.
I guess this issue will therefore be resolved in their next update.

TypeScript Import Confusion - It Can't Be This Hard

I have been working with TypeScript off and on for two years now. I am not an expert by any means, but I've spent some time in the eco-system: with VS2015 and node tools, with VSCode, and at the command line with tsc and typings (also used by VSCode).
And I have struggled with the correct way to get static typing and auto-complete etc in the code I've been writing.
I have a repo I maintain (EasyNodeQ) which was the start of my TypeScript experience and I sort of got that to a manageable place with ///reference and DefinitelyTyped. But any time I tried to use that within another project I had issues.
Things got a little better when I started using typings (rather than downloading the *.d.ts files myself) and especially with the ambient flag.
But I still have lots of issues trying to use that package within other projects. Depending on the approach I take, I get lots of Duplicate Identifier's, or module not found's or...
And this can range from Node definitions, to packages I use in both places (like node-uuid).
All I want to understand is this: how to I structure EasyNodeQ so that as I'm working on it, I get the static typings benefits of TypeScript but also have it be seamlessly included in other projects which can then also get these benefits?
Does that make sense?
The basic use cases are: npm install a package and get its typings, use my EasyNodeQ package and get its typings, work in a new project that uses EasyNodeQ and other packages and easily manage those typings.
Preferably in a VSCode or command line way...
This is with ES6 and the latest version of TypeScript (though an answer that works with ES5 would be nice - just not required).
I hope this makes sense. I've looked all over and I can't cobble together an answer that works.
UPDATE
I'm not convinced I've done this the "right" way, but it's working now so I thought I'd post the various things I've done (generally in the order I think they mattered and not inclusive because I may have forgotten some).
I hadn't npm'd the dependency package (easynodeq) and was just using a git url in the package.json - so I created a proper npm package and now install that package from npm
Instead of trying to use Bus.ts as both code and definition, I made Bus.js the "meat" of the npm, and built a Bus.d.ts file (also in the npm)
Embraced typings, using non-ambient definitions where possible and a mix of ambient definitions downloaded (via git) from DefinitelyTyped and "--ambient" definitions for the rest (because I'm still confused about the difference). The ambient definitions ended-up being the majority: node, express, serve-static, express-serve-static-core, mime, amqplib, when vs just bluebird and node-uuid, even though most of them were found by "typings search ..." Am I doing something wrong?
Modified package.json to also do "typings install"
Cleaned-up the git repo
There are several ways to make this work today. As you mentioned, using Typings works for definitions that aren't natively included in their NPM packages. For ones that do, you can using the typings field in package.json and it'll work with node module resolution. When you combine this together, you can publish packages that use both typings.json and relies on packaged typings - though this now forces your consumers to be using Typings to install the definitions. None of this, however, works with "ambient" definitions as they can not be namespaced properly.
This may be useful: https://github.com/typings/typings/blob/master/docs/faq.md#should-i-use-the-typings-field-in-packagejson. There's also dozens of examples I have using both workflows: https://github.com/blakeembrey/change-case/blob/master/package.json#L6 which uses node module resolution all the way down and https://github.com/blakeembrey/popsicle/blob/master/typings.json which uses Typings instead. Using Typings is only possible because it works to create namespaced ambient modules for you, but they won't conflict.

How to use webpack components

Due to the lack of support of modules or packages under development in npm I have decided to use webpack's components which from the look of the example provided here webpack/examples/components seems to be exactly what I am looking for. However there is no example how to actually use the example. Drawing from webpack's convention I thought that:
webpack/examples/components> webpack component.json > bundle.js
would do the trick but nope I get an error. Tried some other stuff like putting an entry file and an output file in the webpack.config.js but no luck there either. Has someone ever use it, does it work and most importantly how to start it?

Importing Node.js npm modules (node_modules) & declarations in TypeScript

I think it would be great to directly import modules from node_modules directory without need to manually provide a declaration file for it (let us assume that declaration is provided with module itself). I guess that problem are dependencies that come with declarations (file paths could be resolved relative to the module, but that would cause duplicates and compiler can't handle that).
Currently working with node modules is very inconvenient because simple install from npm repository just isn't enough and we have to manually search for declarations and provide them in our project. Let's say that our project is dependent on 10 node modules (all of them have declarations) and after a year we would like to update them. We would have to manually search for new declarations and let's say that we have around 20 projects like this (it would become a nightmare). Maybe there should be an option to directly import .ts file from node module?
Do you have any suggestions?
This is a re-post from CodePlex to hear your opinions ...
If you use grunt-typescript then I've got a pull request which solves this at least for me. See https://github.com/k-maru/grunt-typescript/pull/36
From the pull request README
Working with modules in node_modules (i.e. npm)
The standard way to use npm packages is to provide a definition file
that specifies the package to the typescript and import the module from there.
///<reference path="path/to/mod.d.ts" />
import mod = module('mod')
The typescript compiler will convert the import to a nodejs require.
var mod = require('mod')
This is pretty unwieldy as you need to know the precise path to the
npm installed package and npm can put the package at pretty much any
level when you are working with multiple levels of dependencies.
With the node_modules option in the grunt config you can just
import a npm package without need to know the exact level where the
package has been installed by npm as long as it is installed locally
and not globally.
To import an npm module in your typescript source do
import npmModule = module('node_modules/npmModule/foo')
Mostly due to a lucky chance this works. Typescript compiler will read
the typescript definition file node_modules/npmModule/foo.d.ts if it
is present at some point on the way towards the root and the resulting
javascript file will contain a require for npmModule/foo if needed.
I don't think that node modules will ever contain built-in typescript support. The language still is a 0.x release and officially described as an alpha version.
Nevertheless there are means to ease the configuration process for typescript. Github already contains huge collections of .d.ts files such as:
https://github.com/borisyankov/DefinitelyTyped
or
https://github.com/soywiz/typescript-node-definitions
You might want to take a look at this tool: https://github.com/Diullei/tsd .
I've never used it but it seems like it's almost what you're looking for.
Moreover I've heard that an official database of .d.ts files is planned. Unfortunately I couldn't find the link but it will probably be some time before this is implemented anyways.

Easy way to precompile Emberjs Handlebar templates with nodejs?

I'm enjoying emberjs a lot and would like to take the next step in a couple of my small, mobile apps and precompile my Ember/Handlebars templates as part of my build process.
I'd prefer to stay away from messing with Ruby and would like to use node.js as I'm more comfortable with using it.
I believe what I want to use is Ember.Handlebars.precompile, but unfortunately I'm unable to load the canonical ember.js file in a node environment. Example of a naive attempt from the node repl:
> var e = require('./ember');
ReferenceError: window is not defined
at /Users/jeremyosborne/git/projects/ldls/client/lib/emberjs/src/ember.js:5:1
at Object.<anonymous> (/Users/jeremyosborne/git/projects/ldls/client/lib/emberjs/src/ember.js:1596:2)
--- stack trace, you get the idea ---
I think I've already figured out how to set them up in my code so that they work correctly with my views, I just want to compile them in an environment outside of a browser DOM.
In lieu of getting the canonical ember.js to load in node, are there a specific set of files that I can pluck from the ember repo and use to compile my templates?
EDIT
I did a kluge fix that works great but gets an F for maintainability. I grabbed all the Handlebars code minus the reference to the window object. Then I followed with the Ember.Handlebars.Compiler code, replacing Ember.create with Object.create, exporting my Ember object, and viola things work seemingly great in node (as in it works and the functions produced are templates). But I don't consider this an answer to my own question due to the aforementioned maintainafail, so still open for answers.
EDIT 2
The above turns out to be a total fail. Perhaps there's something wrong in the procedure, but using Ember.Handlebars.precompile or Ember.Handlebars.compile doesn't work. The templates get made, but when I use the precompiled templates attached to Ember.TEMPLATES in my code, they do not work. I only seem to be able to get templates to work when they are explicitly passed in the modified script tags, as suggested on the emberjs.com site.
EDIT 3
I figured out what I was doing wrong. My answer is below.
I've written a grunt plugin called grunt-ember-handlebars that does exactly this. It pretty much mimics Garth's script, with one important difference:
It uses lib/headless-ember.js and lib/ember.js, which are maintained (at least for now) by ember.js to precompile default templates. If you don't want to use grunt, you can extract the relevant code from the precompile_handlebars helper in tasks/ember-handlebars.js.
Found a good enough solution to my problem that seems easy enough to maintain that I'll consider my problem solved.
Here's how I solved things:
Grab the minimal amount of code I need to precompile the ember templates.
Copy the contents of the ember handlebars into a file. This file is located at the emberjs repo: https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js/blob/master/packages/handlebars/lib/main.js
Within the code, find the one instance of window.Handlebars = Handlebars; and remove it.
Append the contents of the Ember template compiler and handlebar overrides. The file is located at the emberjs repo: https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js/blob/master/packages/ember-handlebars/lib/ext.js
Find all instances of Ember.create and change to Object.create.
Outline of the simple precompile procedure:
Load up the code with a var Ember = require('./my_ember_precompiler').Ember.
Get your templates as strings and compile them with var templateString = Ember.Handlebars.precompile(str).toString().
This will be different from app to app, but Ember seems to require registration of precompiled templates. After loading, for every created template, we need to register our templates. Basically wrap templateString in a call to Handlebars.template() and make sure this wrapped function is added to the Ember.TEMPLATES object.
The above is painless when it's automated in a script.
I've published a version of ember-precompiler with a similar interface to the handlebars command line utility. You can install it from NPM:
npm install -g ember-precompile
and then run it as:
ember-precompile template... [-f OUTPUT_FILE]
It does essentially what you describe (and what the gist versions do too): mock out the missing components needed to run Ember and Handlebars, compile the templates and add them to Ember.TEMPLATES.
Take a look at the npm package Ember-Runner
The following gist contains a nodejs build script that will precompile all .handlebars files in a given folder:
https://gist.github.com/1622236
I wrote an official precompiler npm module for anyone else who might be wanting to do this w/ a recent version of ember.js
https://npmjs.org/package/ember-template-compiler
It's simple to install and use (example below)
npm install ember-template-compiler
var compiler = require('ember-template-compiler');
var template = fs.readFileSync('foo.handlebars').toString();
var input = compiler.precompile(template).toString();
var output = "Ember.TEMPLATES['foo'] = Ember.Handlebars.template(" + input + ");";
Look at the code for the official ember-rails gem at https://github.com/emberjs/ember-rails
While it's not a node.js project, it does show you how to precompile the templates using the Rails 3.1+ asset pipeline, and it includes all the necessary Javascript code that you would need to do it in Node without having to hack together a solution that you'd have to maintain on your own.
More specifically, look at vendor/assets/javascripts/ember-precompiler.js and lib/ember-rails/hjs_template.rb
I'm far from an expert on Node (obviously, Rails is more my thing).. but I think those two files should point you in the right direction. Basically, you're going to want to concatenate ember-precompiler.js (which acts as a "shim" for lack of a better word) with ember.js and then call EmberRails.precompile to compile your templates.
window object can be mocked by jsdom
var jsdom = require("jsdom").jsdom;
global.document = jsdom("<html><head></head><body></body></html>");
global.window = document.createWindow();
global.$ = global.jQuery = window.$ = window.jQuery = require("jquery");
global.Handlebars = window.Handlebars = require('handlebars');
global.Application = window.Application = {};
require('ember.js');
and now you can run anything from Ember including Ember.Handlebars.compile

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