JS Templating with Handlebars

Template engines are widely used in web frameworks for example the Rails framework has a templating system called erb. Express is a node.js framework which uses a templating system called handlebars. Microsoft has a templating system for active server pages. Basically these template engines modify HTML pages.

This book will explain the handlebars template engine. Handlebars is a versatile and wildely popular template engine. It’s greatest strength is that it is very easy to use.Before we get into handlebars.js which is a client side javascript templating engine, we’ll go through what a templating engine is and what it does.

A templating engine permits data to be inserted in a web page dynamically.The main function of a template engine is to process a template into text which is then displayed on a webpage.

A templating engine takes a document called a template and inserts data into certain portions of the document.

Templates can be placed anywhere in an HTML document and the templating engine will parse these templates and insert data into them whenever it finds them. Frequently a entire HTML document which contains one or more templates is itself referred to as a template.