April 2, 2013 by Jan Martin Borgersen
JavaScript Templating as a Cross-Stack Presentation/View Layer
Excellent summary of some of the recent evolutions of presentation-tier frameworks. Most larger companies have a variety of application stacks, and are looking for ways to manage design uniformity among them, and Javascript templating coupled with Node.js provide a very compelling presentation tier.
At Zazzle, we are still a small engineering team, all working on the same application stack (at least, for public-facing sites), so this has been far less of an issue for us. We do our templating in server-side libraries, where we can also manage optimizations for high-performance web delivery. Also, prior to Node.js, using a client-side solution was out of the question, since so much of what we do is driven by SEO needs.
However, it is very interesting to see where this is going. Any organization attempting to implement a styleguide across multiple application stacks should be taking a good close look at Javascript frameworks, and thinking about running them on Node.js on the server.