Google releases Closure, the tools behind the JS geniuses

The templating system is interesting. It does something I have not seen before: You can define one template, then execute it server-side (in Java only) and/or client-side (compiled into Javascript).

To achieve this, the template language is quite restricted. It seems that we could write interpreters for this language in Ruby, Python, etc.

Also, we could write a compiler back-end which generates C to run inside nginx or Apache; this could yield a high-performance templating system.

Here's an example template I made. Note that the "javadoc" portion is mandatory and is parsed by the compiler.

    /**
     * show a table
     *
     * @param data      array of values
     * @param ncols     num columns
     */
    {template .vvtable}
        <table cellspacing=10><tr>
        {foreach $d in $data}
            <td><div style="background-color:#f00;padding:5px">{$d}</div></td>
            {if not isFirst($d) and index($d) % $ncols == 0}
                </tr><tr>
            {/if}
        {/foreach}
        </tr></table>
    {/template}

That's what interests me the most.

The stuff they have here for annotating types (love the type expressions), equivalent of #define are major conveniences to ease development. And long overdue. So thanks, Google.

I'm big fan of GWT myself, and one of the reasons is that it allows me to build bigger projects: my JS projects always reached maintainability problems sooner than GWT projects.

EDIT: spelling ..

edit: it seems the library is similar in terms of dom manipulation, but the compiler and templating system seem to be the major differences?