Adding Auto Caching to Our Template Engine

In one of my articles, I showed you how to create a simple JS template engine. In this article I will show you how to add simple caching to the compilation of our templates.

How Caching Works with JS Template Engines

Caching with our template engine is pretty simple. We just keep a key value object and use template strings as keys and functions as values. This will make subsequent uses of a template faster.

Implementing it inside Compile

All our compile function is this:

const compile = (template) => {
    return new Function("data", "return " + compileToString(template))
}

Let's rename this to compileToFunction.

const compileToFunction = (template) => {
    return new Function("data", "return " + compileToString(template))
}

Now let's create a cache. We will use a Map for this.

const cache = new Map();

Now let's add a compile function which uses this cache.

All we need to do is check if the cache.has(template). If not, we need to create it and set it. If it does have it, we just need to return it.

const compile = (template) => {
    if (cache.has(template)) {
        return cache.get(template);
    } else {
        const compiledFunction = compileToFunction(template);
        cache.set(template, compiledFunction);
        return compiledFunction;
    }
}

Changing our Render Function

Currently our render function just uses some Regex to replace all the values.

var render = (template, data) => {
    return template.replace(/{{(.*?)}}/g, (match) => {
        return data[match.split(/{{|}}/).filter(Boolean)[0]]
    })
}

I think we should change it to use compile under the hood for faster automatic caching. It is pretty simple to implement, we just need to run compile and then run that function with data.

const render = (template, data) => {
    return compile(template)(data);
}

Conclusion

In this tutorial I showed how to extend the template engine we made in a previous post with caching for faster compilation and rendering.

Other Articles You Might Like

1. Creating a JS Template Engine
2. 🚀14 JS Template Engines🚀