Jade - Haml killer for nodejs

Last night I open sourced my latest project Jade, a template engine for node, focusing on readability, error handling and performance. Jade spawned from several needs, first I was tired of debugging poor JavaScript template implementations, or finding work-arounds for common issues, secondly I love haml’s syntax, however I feel it could be revamped to provide a more enjoyable experience, and lastly … I like parsers!

Examples

So what does this so called “Jade” look like? like this:

!!! 5
html(lang="en")
  head
    title= pageTitle
    :javascript
      | if (foo) {
      |    bar()
      | }
  body
    h1 Jade - node template engine
    #container
      - if (youAreUsingJade)
        p You are amazing
      - else
        p Get on it!

If you are at all familiar with Haml you will see tons of similarities, however with a few important changes. First of all inverting the responsibility of whitespace we can remove the % tag prefix, leading words are now simply tags, and text blocks now contain a margin as indicated by the pipe |. I am sure people will have varying opinions on this, but I find it much easier to read, and more enjoyable to type since your main focus is building a layout, not writing text blocks.

Features

Below are some of the highlights of 0.0.1:

high performance parser
great readability
code is escaped by default for security
contextual error reporting at compile & run time
executable for compiling jade templates via the command line
html 5 mode (using the !!! 5 doctype)
optional memory caching
combine dynamic and static tag classes
no tag prefix
filters
- :sass
- :markdown
- :cdata
- :javascript

Implementations

As of this moment JavaScript (node specifically) is the only Jade implementation, however as with Haml this could easily be ported to other host languages, and I encourage it greatly! Even if you are not a JavaScript guy feel free to try it out, and implement it in your language of choice :)