django-djammit

A very basic way of handling javascript templates and including javascript include tags in your django apps.

VERY EARLY ALPHA RELASE! Actually, it might not work at all.

The name Djammit and the code (or atleast the ideas) has pretty much been ripped from DocumentCloud's Jammit which is a much more advanced and mature tool for Ruby on Rails.

Usage

Start out by setting your STATIC_ROOT (ex: /var/www/project/static) and your STATIC_URL (ex: /static/) settings. Those settings will be used when Djammit looks for files matching the patterns you specify.

You tell Djammit which files to include by setting the DJAMMIT_JAVSCRIPTS setting as a dictionary of packages with patterns.:

DJAMMIT_JAVASCRIPTS = {
    'core': (
        'js/libs/jquery-*.js',
        'js/libs/underscore*.js',
        'js/libs/*.js',
        'js/model/**/*.js',
    ),
    'ui': (
        'js/views/**/*.js',
        'js/templates/**/*.jst',
    )
}

Now you need to add {% include_javascript core ui %} for Djammit to load the packages.

When Debug = True the include_javascript template tag will render all of the included javascript include tags if Debug = False the files will be compiled into a single JavaScript file named after the package they are in.

Right now Djammit also runs Django's management command collectstatic on every request which will move changed files to your static root folder. If you are using django-staticfiles with Django pre 1.3 or some other app you can specify which collect command to run by setting the DJAMMIT_COLLECT_COMMAND.

As you can see in the above example the ui package includes javascript templates (*.jst). The templates will be included in a file named after the package (core.js in this case) which in production (Debug = False) will be the same file as the javascript is compiled into. The templates can later be accessed using the JST namespace.:

$(this.el).html(JST['name']({model: this.model}));

You can change the template files extension with the DJAMMIT_TEMPLATE_EXTENSION setting and the namespace (defaults to JST) with the DJAMMIT_TEMPLATE_NAMESPACE setting. By default the template engine used is underscore.js' _.template method. You can change that to something else using the DJAMMIT_TEMPLATE_FUNCTION setting.