Using Jade templates in Backbone.js

Question

I love the HAML-like syntax of Jade's templating engine in Node.js, and I would love to use it client-side within Backbone.js.

I've seen Backbone commonly using Underscore.js templating in the following style.

/* Tunes.js */
window.AlbumView = Backbone.View.extend({
  initialize: function() {
    this.template = _.template($('#album-template').html());
  },

  // ...
});

/* Index.html */
<script type="text/template" id="album-template">
  <span class="album-title"><%= title %></span>
  <span class="artist-name"><%= artist %></span>
  <ol class="tracks">
    <% _.each(tracks, function(track) { %>
      <li><%= track.title %></li>
    <% }); %>
  </ol>
</script>

What I'd like to see is a way to use AJAX (or some other method) to fetch Jade templates and render them within the current HTML.

Answer 1

I was able to run Jade client-side using jade-browser project.

Integration with Backbone is then simple: Instead of _template() I'm using jade.compile().

HTML (scripts and template):

<script class="jsbin" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.1.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://raw.github.com/weepy/jade-browser/master/jade.js"></script>
<script src="https://raw.github.com/weepy/jade-browser/master/jade-shim.js"></script>
<script src="http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/underscore-min.js"></script>
<script src="http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/backbone-min.js"></script>

<script type="template" id="test">
div.class1
  div#id
    | inner
  div#nav
    ul(style='color:red')
      li #{item}
      li #{item}
      li #{item}
      li #{item}
script
  $('body').append('i am from script in jade')
</script>

JavaScript (integration with Backbone.View):

var jade = require("jade");

var TestView = Backbone.View.extend({

  initialize: function() {
    this.template = jade.compile($("#test").text());
  },

  render: function() {
    var html = this.template({ item: 'hello, world'});
    $('body').append(html);
  }
});

var test = new TestView();
test.render();

HERE is the code.