django-jinja-knockout 0.1.2

Bootstrap / Jinja2 / Knockout.js integration into Django projects.

Bootstrap / Jinja2 / Knockout.js integration into Django projects.

Overview

Templating languages are my favorite topic in programming. I love compact and semantically organic way of HTML templating in Knockout.js, which uses html5 data-bind JSON-like attributes instead of semantically alien double braces, which conflict almost every server-side templating language out there (including Jinja2).

When developing with Django, I felt a lack of very powerful server-side templating when used built-in DTL templates. So I switched to Jinja2, thank to Django 1.8+ built-in support of this templating engine and to great project https://github.com/niwinz/django-jinja which simplifies Jinja2 integration.

So, basically in this project two great templating engines (client-side https://github.com/knockout/knockout and server-side https://github.com/mitsuhiko/jinja2) meet together. That allows to write complex dynamic HTML code with less effort, cleaner look and easily readable. Both also are very fast, Knockout.js templates being one of the fastest at client-side, while Jinja2 estimated to be faster few times than built-in DTL templates, and is more powerful.

When thinking of Angluar.js, not only I dislike curly braces in templates but also I believe that using such large framework for non-SPA applications is an overkill. And Django primary usage are non-SPA classical Web applications, which aren’t “outdated” in any way - because such applications are much better indexable by web crawlers and Python is better language than Javascript in general and server-side has less glitches than browsers.

Most of client-side scripts included into this redistributable app are server-side agnostic and are not tied much to Django, except for client-side localization. In fact, most of that client-side code is also used in large Laravel project as well. They are included for developer’s convenience. Also my personal feeling is, that Django itself lacks a bit heavier support of client-side Javascript out-of-box. Knockout.js would be great inclusion for empty_form handling and in django.admin, considering it’s small size.

However, some of server-side functionality, like AJAX form validation and viewmodels manipulation is either useless or will not work without these scripts.

Obviously, only AJAX response parts and DOM manipulation (eg. Knockout.js processing of formset.empty_form) are tied to bundled client-side scripts.

Documentation

The full documentation is at https://django-jinja-knockout.readthedocs.org.

Quick notes:

• Installation

• Introduction

• How to contribute

• History

• Credits

Cookiecutter Tools Used in Making This Package

• cookiecutter

• cookiecutter-djangopackage

History

0.1.0

• To be released on PyPI.