gliechtenstein

Another use case is implementing actual functional programming. This one is not as straight-forward since it involves maintaining another separate state machine for function call stack. But this is also achieved using ST templates. Here's a blog post that talks about it in detail http://blog.jasonette.com/2017/02/15/functional-programming-... but it's a bit involved.

Also Jasonette has something called mixins, which you probably can guess based on its name. It lets you mix in JSON objects into another, so that you can make the app modular. That's also achieved internally using ST.

Overall, I believe even I'm just scratching the surface of what this can do, which is why I decided to take some time to clean things up and prepare and open it up as its own repo, because I think there's tons of other things that can be done by taking advantage of the fact that all that's happening is:

JSON A + JSON B = JSON C

Hope this makes sense!

Other than ST.js, I also work on another open source project called Jasonette (https://www.jasonette.com), which lets you write an entire native iOS/Android app in nothing but JSON markup.

And when you can express the entire app logic--from model to view to controller--in JSON, you can split them up whichever way you want and load them from anywhere (from a file, from cache, from a remote server, or from local memory).

But the biggest benefit of all is: you can load an entire ios/android native app from the server in realtime, just like how web browsers load HTML/JS/CSS in realtime.

When working on Jasonette, implementing model and view was relatively simple. For model it's natural since JSON is all about describing data. For view i just needed to come up with a syntax to describe layouts and all the standard mobile UI components in JSON.

However the biggest challenge was how do i actually describe functions in JSON. Without a function, it's just a mockup and won't really do anything meaningful.

Which brings us to ST.js.

When you think about what a function is, it takes one value and turns it into another. So basically what I needed to do was build something that will take one JSON, and turn it into another JSON, but most importantly I would have to do it using JSON. Basically I needed to implement a finite state machine in purely JSON.

And this is what templates do. So I set out to build a JSON template engine that turns one JSON into another using a template which itself is written in JSON.

What's really cool about this is, since the template is JSON (As far as I know there doesn't exist any prior art that uses JSON as a template, otherwise I would have used it instead), it has all the benefits of the JSON format itself:

1. You can store it anywhere (Most DBMS nowadays support JSON natively)

2. You can send it over the Internet

3. You can compose them easily

4. You can validate them using JSON schema

5. etc.

To use a more specific example, I use ST.js in both Android and iOS versions of Jasonette as the template engine. And a JSON template is absolutely necessary in this case.

For example, if I want to take a piece of device-generated data and render it, I need to be able to somehow parse it client-side (can't send it back to server to re-generate a JSON) http://docs.jasonette.com/templates/#3-device-api-generated-...

This also applies to many cases where the client-side data contains privacy-sensitive data. The only way to dynamically parse something that happens on the client side is by writing the template itself in JSON and sending it over as data.

Anyway, I hope you guys take a look at the examples on the homepage to get a glimpse of what makes ST.js powerful. Each example is almost its own library, except that you don't need a separate library for those purposes since all you're dealing with is JSON.

Basically you can send the JSON template over JSON to the server, and let the server transform the raw data using the template before returning.

The most important benefit here is that, since everything can be expressed in JSON, it can be stored or transmitted over the Internet, which enables interesting cases like this.

For background, I am working on a JS library called cell.js (https://www.celljs.org), which turns a JSON object into a dynamic web app.

Anyway, this particular app (HTML to JSON to DOM) takes any HTML, parses it into JSON, and feeds it to cell.js, which then turns it back to DOM again. I built it because sometimes I just want to take an existing HTML and transform it to JSON, so I can turn any existing website into cell, and it works pretty well for that purpose.

You can try copy and pasting any website HTML into it to see the effect, as shown at https://github.com/gliechtenstein/HTML2JSON2DOM. Hope you find it cool as well!