Current state of JavaScript template engines?

Question

I did some research months ago looking for a nice javascript template engine and settled on one made by Trimpath.

I like this a lot, but I have a few wish list items:

• The code is rather big. I'd love something tiny, like John Resig's template engine, but easier to use.
• I'd like support for includes, and django-style inheritance.

Are there any other great template engines which have been released in the past year or so which I should know about?

Answer 1

Update: I thought I'd come back and update this to let people know that we settled on Handlebars.js. We've got several months experience with it under our collective belts and we've been very happy with our choice. It has the basics included and you can create helpers that give you additional capabilities as needed.

There's also ICanHandlebarz (similar to ICanHaz for Mustache) and http://tryhandlebarsjs.com/ so you can try before you buy, so to speak.

I now return you to the original answer I gave.

We've been doing a survey of JavaScript template engines because there are so many and they have many different syntax and performance profiles (some compiled, some not, etc.).

Unfortunately our favorite solution was jQuery Templates and it worked great. Now it's deprecated software and the proposed replacement for it (JsRender) is no where near ready to use at the time I write this (Oct 2011). So while there are so many to choose from, after having a solution we were quite happy with, we are suddenly adrift again and trying to find its replacement.

Comparisons

• http://wiki.jqueryui.com/w/page/37898666/Template
• http://wiki.jqueryui.com/w/page/41375604/Template-Comparison
• http://www.viget.com/extend/benchmarking-javascript-templating-libraries/

Template Loaders

• http://icanhazjs.com/
• https://github.com/Nijikokun/Templator
• http://markdalgleish.com/projects/tmpload/

Engines

• https://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl
• https://github.com/BorisMoore/jsrender
• http://code.google.com/p/jsmart/
• https://github.com/janl/mustache.js
• http://www.yajet.net/
• http://code.google.com/p/trimpath/wiki/JavaScriptTemplates
• http://embeddedjs.com/
• http://beebole.com/pure/
• http://akdubya.github.com/dustjs/
• http://code.google.com/closure/templates/
• https://github.com/wycats/handlebars.js/
• http://code.google.com/p/kite/
• http://twigkit.github.com/tempo/
• https://github.com/aefxx/jQote2
• https://github.com/trix/nano
• http://viewjs.com/
• http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/#template
• http://code.google.com/p/js-tempest/
• https://github.com/creationix/haml-js
• https://github.com/atduskgreg/srender
• https://github.com/mikesamuel/jquery-jquery-tmpl-proposal