CC BY-SA 2.0 by tetue

Recently I worked on a project where clojure was used on the back end and javascript on the front end. Handlebars was used for front end templating. However, at some point a need emerged to do some server side rendering. Wanting to keep things DRY we looked for a solution that would allow us to have same templates both server and client side.

What we found was clojure library called hbs. Hbs is a wrapper around handlebars.java that allows handlebars templates to be rendered server side.

Most important thing is the render-function. It takes template and context as parameters and returns compiled result.

(use '[hbs.core])

(render "<h1>{{title}}<h1>" {:title "Hello"}); => <h1>Hello<h1>

You can define helpers with clojure using defhelper-macro

(use '[hbs.helper])

(defhelper dollars [amount options] (format "$%,d" amount))
(render "{{dollars amt}}" {:amt 12345}); => "$12,345"

or you can use regular javascript helpers by loading the javascript-file which defines helpers

//helpers.js
(Handlebars.registerHelper('dollars', function (amount) {
  return "$"+amount.toLocaleString();
});

(register-javascript-helpers! "helpers.js")
(render "{{dollars amt}}" {:amt 12345}); => "$12345"

That's it. Nothing fancy but worked well for our case. I hope you might find it useful as well.