Django and jquery.tmpl

Lately, I’ve been finding Django increasingly inappropriate for the web applications I develop. I have several complaints: the forms library doesn’t extend well to ajax requests, any extensive customization to the admin requires obtuse inspection of the admin source code, many admin customizations simply aren’t possible, the “reusable apps” philosophy has added a layer of complexity to a lot of things that really should not be there, there are no obvious best practices for ajax support.

In spite of all this Django is still better than other frameworks (Python or not) that I have investigated or tested. I’ve considered writing my own web framework, but I wouldn’t maintain interest in it long enough to get it off the ground. So I’m letting my complaints bounce around in the back of my mind with the hopes that I can improve Django so that it continues to work for me as a platform.

I’m currently trying to come up with a better system for ajax requests. I have nothing concrete in mind, but I’ve started with the premise that ajax requests should never return rendered html, but should return only json (hence my issue with the django forms library). With that in mind, I need a templating library for json data. JQuery is a must, and the officially supported JQuery templating library is jquery.tmpl http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/templates/

The problem with jquery.tmpl is that it uses django-like syntax. The following is a valid block that may be rendered in a jquery.tmpl page:

<script id="project_tmpl" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl">
    {{each projects}}<li>${$value}</li>{{/each}}
</script>

If you try to include this in a django template, the {{ and }} tags will be replaced with (probably) empty variables. Django has {% templatetag %} to render these individual items, but what we really need is a way to tell the django templating system to leave complete sections of code alone. So I wrote the jqtmpl template tag. It allows us to wrap code in a block that tells Django not to render that block as template code. So the above would show up in a Django template as follows:

<script id="project_tmpl" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl">
{% jqtmpl %}
    {{each projects}}<li>${$value}</li>{{/each}}
{% endjqtmpl %}
</script>

Here’s the template tag:

from django.template import Library, TextNode, TOKEN_BLOCK, TOKEN_VAR
 
register = Library()
 
@register.tag
def jqtmpl(parser, token):
    nodes = []
    t = parser.next_token()
    while not (t.token_type == TOKEN_BLOCK and t.contents == "endjqtmpl"):
        if t.token_type == TOKEN_BLOCK:
            nodes.extend(["{%", t.contents, "%}"])
        elif t.token_type == TOKEN_VAR:
            nodes.extend(["{{", t.contents, "}}"])
        else:
            nodes.append(t.contents)
 
        t = parser.next_token()
 
    return TextNode(''.join(nodes))

This doesn’t handle Django’s {# comments #}, as token.contents doesn’t return a valid value for comment items. As far as I know, you wouldn’t use the comment construct inside a jquery.tmpl template anyway, so it’s still functional.

Next on my list is a better forms validation library to suit my theory that validation should be done client side. I’ve got a server-side system in mind that returns json responses, and does not return user-facing error messages, since those should have been caught client side. With these tools, and hopes for Grappelli to eventually create a decent admin, Django may continue to serve me.