Master thesis of Anders Ingemann

This is the repository of my master thesis, which I began in 2012 and ended february 2013. The end-result is a parser for the mustache templating language and a javascript library which uses the output of that parser.

The parser outputs a JSON document that specifies locations of mustache variables and sections in a template. This document is then used by the client to pinpoint those locations in the rendered template via the DOM.
This allows client-side apps to:

1. Rebuild the data that was used to render a mustache template on the server without any back-channel
2. Obtain references to DOM nodes that contain variable data without using any query selectors

Notable features

• The parser recognizes any html that is also a well-formed xml document (mustache variables as attribute names do not work)
• Mustache sections that act as loops are recognized by the client side library - the library will return an array containing the data for each iteration (this also goes for nested loops).
• Data in comment nodes is also recognized
• Whitespace is significant, which means the client library will only return the true contents of var in a template like this: <div> {{var}} </div>
• The client library will not only return the data used to render the template, but also the nodes each piece of data is located in.

Downloads

You can download my entire thesis as a tarball from the releases page. The PDFs of my thesis are in the thesis/ folder (available in 3 versions: print, PC and ebook).

Disclaimer

The library is only finished to the point where I was able present my results. I have not touched it since and it requires quite a bit work to become production ready.