SpacePen

Write markup on the final frontier

SpacePen is a powerful but minimalist client-side view framework for CoffeeScript. It combines the "view" and "controller" into a single jQuery object, whose markup is expressed with an embedded DSL similar to Markaby for Ruby.

Basics

View objects extend from the View class and have a @content class method where you express their HTML contents with an embedded markup DSL:

class Spacecraft extends View
  @content: ->
    @div =>
      @h1 "Spacecraft"
      @ol =>
        @li "Apollo"
        @li "Soyuz"
        @li "Space Shuttle"

Views descend from jQuery's prototype, so when you construct one you can call jQuery methods on it just as you would a DOM fragment created with $(...).

view = new Spacecraft
view.find('ol').append('<li>Star Destroyer</li>')

view.on 'click', 'li', ->
  alert "They clicked on #{$(this).text()}"

But SpacePen views are more powerful than normal jQuery fragments because they let you define custom methods:

class Spacecraft extends View
  @content: -> ...

  addSpacecraft: (name) ->
    @find('ol').append "<li>#{name}</li>"


view = new Spacecraft
view.addSpacecraft "Enterprise"

You can also pass a params hash on construction:

class Spacecraft extends View
  @content: (params) ->
    @div =>
      @h1 params.title
      @ol =>
        @li name for name in params.spacecraft

view = new Spacecraft(title: "Space Weapons", spacecraft: ["TIE Fighter", "Death Star", "Warbird"])

Methods from the jQuery prototype can be gracefully overridden using super:

class Spacecraft extends View
  @content: -> ...

  hide: ->
    console.log "Hiding Spacecraft List"
    super()

If you override the View class's constructor, ensure you call super. Alternatively, you can define an initialize method, which the constructor will call for you automatically with params.

class Spacecraft extends View
  @content: -> ...

  initialize: (params) ->
    @title = params.title

Outlets and Events

SpacePen will automatically create named reference for any element with an outlet attribute. For example, if the ol element has an attribute outlet=list, the view object will have a list entry pointing to a jQuery wrapper for the ol element.

class Spacecraft extends View
  @content: ->
    @div =>
      @h1 "Spacecraft"
      @ol outlet: "list", =>
        @li "Apollo"
        @li "Soyuz"
        @li "Space Shuttle"

  addSpacecraft: (name) ->
    @list.append("<li>#{name}</li>")

Elements can also have event name attributes whose value references a custom method. For example, if a button element has an attribute click=launchSpacecraft, then SpacePen will invoke the launchSpacecraft method on the button`s parent view when it is clicked:

class Spacecraft extends View
  @content: ->
    @div =>
      @h1 "Spacecraft"
      @ol =>
        @li click: 'launchSpacecraft', "Saturn V"

  launchSpacecraft: (event, element) ->
    console.log "Preparing #{element.name} for launch!"

Markup DSL Details

Tag Methods (`@div`, `@h1`, etc.)

As you've seen so far, the markup DSL is pretty straightforward. From the @content class method or any method it calls, just invoke instance methods named for the HTML tags you want to generate. There are 3 types of arguments you can pass to a tag method:

Strings The string will be HTML-escaped and used as the text contents of the generated tag.
Hashes The key-value pairs will be used as the attributes of the generated tag.
Functions (bound with =>) The function will be invoked in-between the open and closing tag to produce the HTML element's contents.

If you need to emit a non-standard tag, you can use the @tag(name, args...) method to name the tag with a string:

@tag 'bubble', type: "speech", => ...

Text Methods

@text(string) Emits the HTML-escaped string as text wherever it is called.
@raw(string) Passes the given string through unescaped. Use this when you need to emit markup directly that was generated beforehand.

Subviews

Subviews are a great way to make your view code more modular. The @subview(name, view) method takes a name and another view object. The view object will be inserted at the location of the call, and a reference with the given name will be wired to it from the parent view. A parentView reference will be created on the subview pointing at the parent.

class Spacecraft extends View
  @content: (params) ->
    @div =>
      @subview 'launchController', new LaunchController(countdown: params.countdown)
      @h1 "Spacecraft"
      ...

Freeform Markup Generation

You don't need a View class to use the SpacePen markup DSL. Call View.render with an unbound function (->, not =>) that calls tag methods, and it will return a document fragment for ad-hoc use. This method is also assigned to the $$ global variable for convenience.

view.list.append $$ ->
  @li =>
    @text "Starship"
    @em "Enterprise"

jQuery extensions

$.fn.view

You can retrieve the view object for any DOM element by calling view() on it. This usually shouldn't be necessary, as most DOM manipulation will take place within the view itself using outlet references, but is occasionally helpful.

view = new Spacecraft
$('body').append(view)

# assuming no other li elements on the DOM, for example purposes,
# the following expression should be true
$('li').view() == view

After Attach Hooks

The initialize method is always called when the view is still a detached DOM fragment, before it is appended to the DOM. This is usually okay, but occasionally you'll have some initialization logic that depends on the view actually being on the DOM. For example, you may depend on applying a CSS rule before measuring an element's height.

SpacePen extends jQuery manipulation methods like append, replaceWith, etc. to call afterAttach hooks on your view objects when they are appended to other elements. The hook will be called with a boolean value indicating whether the view is attached to the main DOM or just to another DOM fragment. If afterAttach is called with true, you can assume your object is attached to the page.

class Spacecraft extends View
  @content: -> ...

  afterAttach: (onDom) ->
    if onDom
      console.log "With CSS applied, my height is", @height()
    else
      console.log "I just attached to", @parent()

Anticipated Concerns / Objections

What about the view/controller distinction?

MVC was invented in a setting where graphics rendering was substantially more complex than it is in a web browser. In Cocoa development, for example, a view object's primary role is to implement drawRect and forward UI events to the controller. But in a browser, you don't need to handle your own rendering with drawRect. Instead, you express the view declaratively using markup and CSS, and the browser takes care of the rest. The closest thing to a MVC "view" in this world is a fragment of markup, but this contains very little logic. On the web, the view/controller distinction is like a vestigial organ: It's a solution to a problem we no longer have, and no longer justifies the conceptual overhead of using two objects where one would do.

Our designers can't handle writing markup in CoffeeScript

Okay. SpacePen might not be the right fit for you. But are you sure they can't handle it? What if you pair with them for a couple hours and teach them what to do? There's also the potential of plugging in another template language for content generation, while keeping the rest of the framework. But if developers are writing the majority of the markup, expressing it directly in CoffeeScript is a productivity win.

Hacking on SpacePen

To run specs, start a web server in the root of the repository:

gem install serve-this
cd ~/code/space-pen
serve-this

tiojoca/space-pen