Spark and jQuery Templates learn how to play nice

A couple of folks are running into trouble while trying to use the recently popular jQuery Templates in combination with the Spark View Engine for one innocuous, simple reason – they both use the ${blah} syntax as placeholders for their magic bits. It is now gaining even more popularity due to Steve Sanderson’s AWESOME Knockout JS library and I’m not surprised – it seriously kicks ass!

Don’t just get the Spark View Engine - NuGet it now

For a couple of weeks now the Spark View Engine has been available as a package from the NuGet server but last night it had a bit of a makeover.

If you open the package manager and filter on “Spark” as I have, you’ll see two copies of the Spark Core and the Spark.Web.Mvc packages. The highlighted one is the latest build, and the other is the latest release from a while before that – version 1.1 to be exact. At this stage, I would recommend using the latest build due to a number of fixes and additions that have been added recently.

Don’t you tell me where to put my damn views – I’ll tell you!

Ever get the feeling the MVC framework you’re using has more control over you than you have over it? This is a common trend when trying to bring convention over configuration to applications built with the framework. Conventions are great for the most part, Ruby on Rails for example prescribes exactly where *everything* goes and MS MVC adopts this approach too. If you don’t put your views here, and your controllers there, they just ain’t views or controllers, even if they look, act and smell like views or controllers.

FubuMVC works a little differently

Elegant MVC with Spark - The way views were meant to be

I’ll be doing another online presentation next week. The same guys who organised the very successful mvcconf.com, have asked me to talk more in depth about the Spark View Engine in the MVC space, only this time for c4mvc. It’s a similar format using Live Meeting, but this time I hope to record it locally to avoid the lag from the previous recording.

I didn't quite manage to finish

Spark Bindings – are you tired of eating “Tag Soup” yet?

Since giving my talk at mvcconf, I’ve received numerous requests to talk a little more about the mysterious Bindings feature in Spark. To be clear, it’s only mysterious because it’s the newest feature in the framework and because of lack of documentation – that is until now. Louis Dejardin has outdone himself once again and put a very thorough piece of documentation together for this. I’m not going to rehash the official docs here, but instead suggest

I don’t want your stinkin’ code comments

I just read a fantastic thought experiment being put forward and trialled by Jesse Liberty at the moment. I’ve written this post in support of that effort and to express my gratitude that he is putting his name behind it! I have to say that I 100% agree with his assertions in the article and I’ve been coding like this for the better part of four years now (even on large production systems with > 2 million LOC) without any of the “missing comment bogeymen” coming to get me or my team mates. In fact, existing comments in those systems have

SparkSense gets its first outing

Well well well, some say “it’s about time”, but personally I say “it’s too soon”, but then again, that’s exactly what they say a beta period is for. There is so much work on the back burner here that I could just keep going for ages in my little cave, but I think it’s important to give SparkSense a little air, even if that means it only ends up being pushed back into its box.
My expectation is that the current beta version is not fit for use in a production sense – in other words, you’re not going to be that much more productive than writing Spark in a plain text editor providing you know the API fairly well. It’s not going to break or overwrite your code or anything like that, but I am still