Jaml seems to have been getting a lot of interest lately. Here are a few quick updates on what's been going on:

• Tom Robinson added support for CommonJS
• Eneko Alonso ported the project to MooTools, creating mooml
• Carl Furrow wrote up a nice comparison on Jaml and EJS
• Jaml is now a rendering option in JavaScriptMVC, along with John Resig's microtemplates
• Andrew Dupont committed a series of patches such as improving Jaml's efficiency and optionally removing the 'with' and 'eval' magic

In addition Jaml was recently picked up by Ajaxian, and a couple of people have written up blog posts about Jaml in languages other than English, which is great to see.

Jaml is up on Github and has a number of forks already. If you like the library and have something to add, fork away and send me a pull request!

If you've never seen Jaml before or have forgotten what it does, it turns this:

div(
  h1("Some title"),
  p("Some exciting paragraph text"),
  br(),

  ul(
    li("First item"),
    li("Second item"),
    li("Third item")
  )
);

Into this:

<div>
  <h1>Some title</h1>
  <p>Some exciting paragraph text</p>
  <br />
  <ul>
    <li>First item</li>
    <li>Second item</li>
    <li>Third item</li>
  </ul>
</div>

Generating HTML with JavaScript has always been ugly. Hella ugly. It usually involves writing streams of hard-to-maintain code which just concatenates a bunch of strings together and spits them out in an ugly mess.

Wouldn't it be awesome if we could do something pretty like this:

div(
  h1("Some title"),
  p("Some exciting paragraph text"),
  br(),

  ul(
    li("First item"),
    li("Second item"),
    li("Third item")
  )
);

And have it output something beautiful like this:

<div>
  <h1>Some title</h1>
  <p>Some exciting paragraph text</p>
  <br />
  <ul>
    <li>First item</li>
    <li>Second item</li>
    <li>Third item</li>
  </ul>
</div>

With Jaml, we can do exactly that. Jaml is a simple library inspired by the excellent Haml library for Ruby. It works by first defining a template using an intuitive set of tag functions, and then rendering it to appear as pretty HTML. Here's an example of how we'd do that with the template above:

Jaml.register('simple', function() {
  div(
    h1("Some title"),
    p("Some exciting paragraph text"),
    br(),

    ul(
      li("First item"),
      li("Second item"),
      li("Third item")
    )
  );
});

Jaml.render('simple');