I needed a streaming template engine for a web app I'm building that works in Node.js, the browser, and service workers. Existing solutions like flora-tmpl were great for Node.js, but I needed something smaller and compatible with all environments. So, I created whatwg-flora-tmpl (name pending), a lightweight library based on the WhatWG Streams API. It uses template literals, handles dynamic content, and even supports nested streams. The example code demonstrates how it can be used to render HTML responses piece by piece instead of waiting for all data, significantly improving perceived performance. It's particularly useful for responses generated in service worker fetch events. Big thanks to Matthew Phillips, the creator of flora-tmpl, which served as the inspiration for this project.
In this post, I explore importing npm modules into web projects using ES6 modules. I needed a quick way to use the 'get-urls' npm module in my ES6 project without resorting to CommonJS bundling. My solution involves creating a wrapper file to import the module, using Rollup to handle Node globals and builtins, converting to ES modules via the CommonJS plugin, and finally, including the bundled file. This highlights a larger issue: much of the Node ecosystem, though not inherently Node-specific, is tightly coupled with it through CommonJS and APIs like 'Buffer' and the old 'URL.' Transitioning to ubiquitous ES modules will require effort and potentially be painful. Until the ecosystem adapts, we'll rely on conversion tools and bundlers for cross-platform code sharing. While using '.mjs' as a standard extension is promising, the lack of infrastructure recognizing it as 'text/javascript' necessitates further server-side configuration, which adds complexity.
