Template considerations in ECP

Recently, the ECP development team has started to question the validity of building HTML templates that essentially do the same thing as the ECP RESTful API. Of course we need to build HTML templates, it is a web application after all. What the discussion here comes down to is the age old question of separation of concerns. How much logic should be contained in the template if any? Kid templates, for example, offer several means of implementing logic within the template. I think the ability to construct page elements iteratively within the template itself is a powerful concept and solves a very basic problem. Iterating through a set and building elements does not necessarily mean you are not carefully considering the separation of concerns idea. Who knows, the set being iterated through may be data that was specifically built for the template. That is the idealistic case but it is also hard to come by in software development given the common time constraints today.

Anyway, back to the problem of how to build a web interface without building gigantic HTML templates. One may think that since in the case of ECP the problem is simple; there already exists a RESTful API, why not use some javascript library such as jQuery to build the entire HTML content based on the results of querying the RESTful API? If it were that simple, I think everyone would build things that way would they not? I mean, it would make sense to build a web application with a fancy GUI interface that is inherently flexible enough to support any client that was built to use it. Without the RESTful API, all you have is the stand-alone server with many browsers executing the same client code connecting to the server. Not a whole lot of diversity in this situation. As far as I'm concerned, the days of writing HTML parsers to fit a particular client purpose are over. The demands have risen and for good reason.

The moral here, if there is one, is the bottom line is the software does what it is supposed to do and that clients can interact with it somehow. If it is only a browser that needs to communicate with your application, build HTML templates. If there are only custom-built clients using your software, use JSON/XML. If you can do both, do it. That is what the current boat in which ECP resides. In the future, hopefully we can develop some javascript that is sophisticated enough to build the entire interface using the RESTful API data. I think this is a very real possibility.