Recently I was trolling through my collection of lesser-read developer blogs when I came across a September, 2010 blog post from James Senior on jQuery templates, and from there to this one by Stephen Walther. The big news at the time was that Microsoft was going to start contributing code to the jQuery project.
One their first projects was a templating plugin. The idea is you can embed a chunk of markup in a page that contains placeholders for data. Then you call the plugin, pass it some data, and it merges everything into the template, producing markup that is ready for rendering. It looked like just the kind of thing I’d want to start using in production, today. Turns out that would have been a bad idea.
After I downloaded the code and some samples, I surfed around a bit more on the subject and learned that they are no longer actively maintaining the jQuery template plugin. They have decided to go in a new direction. Which is fine, but woe are the people who decided to invest heavily in the plugin during those first few months and are now stuck with a dead-end tool.
The rate of change of web technologies and tools is getting scary fast, and it makes me subconsciously shy away from the latest new stuff because it could all be replaced in 6 months. That might not be the best approach for a professional developer to take, but neither is having such instability in the LOB applications you have to write and maintain.
