braindump: rerenderables

[sethkinast]

@jimmyhchan talked about this last year and I think it finally clicked for me.

dust.render returns undefined right now and uses a callback. Jimmy talked about "streaming into templates" last year and I never quite grokked it, but I think this might be it.

What about an API something like this:

let renderable = dust.render(template, context, function(err, out) {
  // some side effect, appending to or replacing DOM or whatever
});

renderable.render(anotherContext); // uses the same template and the same callback
someStream.pipe(renderable); // maybe this invokes the callback once for every data event

This would give you a renderable that you could store and reuse to update a certain portion of DOM with new data. Identifying when data changed would still be your responsibility, this is just so you don't have to manually wire it all up again.

[jimmyhchan]

this might be related https://github.com/jimmyhchan/dustjs-stweem