Putting a mustache on Tiles-3

We’re proud to see a contribution from one of our developers end up in the Tiles-3 release!

The front-end architecture of FINN.no is evolving to be a lot more advanced and a lot more work is being done by client-side scripts. In order to maintain first time rendering speeds and to prevent duplicating template-code we needed something which allowed us to reuse templates both client- and server-side. This is where mustache templates have come into play. We could’ve gone ahead and done a large template framework review, like others have done, but we instead opted to just solve the problem with the technology we already had.

Morten Lied Johansen’s contribution allows Tiles-3 to render mustache templates. Existing jsp templates can be rewritten into mustache without having to touch surrounding templates or code!

The code please

To get Tiles-3 to do this include the tiles-request-mustache library and configure your TilesContainerFactory like

    protected void registerAttributeRenderers(...) {
        MustacheRenderer mustacheRenderer = new MustacheRenderer();
        mustacheRenderer.setAcceptPattern(Pattern.compile(".*.mustache"));
        rendererFactory.registerRenderer("mustache", mustacheRenderer);
        ...
    }
    protected Renderer createTemplateAttributeRenderer(...) {
        final ChainedDelegateRenderer chainedRenderer = new ChainedDelegateRenderer();
        chainedRenderer.addAttributeRenderer(rendererFactory.getRenderer("mustache"));
        ...
    }

then you’re free to replace existing tiles attributes like

<put-attribute name="my_template" value="/WEB-INF/my_template.jsp"></put-attribute>

with stuff like

<put-attribute name="my_template" value="/my_template.mustache"></put-attribute>

Good stuff FINN!