Why would I need template engines like Jade or EJS on the backend?

node.js pug template-engine ejs
brainmassage picture brainmassage · Sep 3, 2016 · Viewed 7.6k times · Source

I am familiar with Angularjs(1.x) and use templates in directives.

Currently I am learning nodejs and as a part of the course template engines are mentioned. What are the advantages of using them on the backend?

Currently I can't see any use.

Answer

robertklep picture robertklep · Sep 3, 2016

If you have data (say from a database) that needs to be rendered to HTML, you can use a template engine to take the data and a template and render it to HTML (which subsequently gets served to the client).

If your frontend app does the same, using XHR calls or something similar to retrieve the data from the server, it's generally not useful to render to HTML server side (instead, the data gets sent as JSON to the client).

So it depends on how your app (both frontend and backend) is structured if it makes sense or not to use a templating engine.

There's also hybrid solutions where the initial HTML is rendered server side, and then the client side "takes over". This is something that, for instance, React supports. The big idea there is that you can use the same components both on the server and on the client, and that when a page is opened, the user will get to see a fully rendered initial page (instead of the client side having to retrieve the data from the backend first and then rendering the page).

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