Jinja vs Flow (JS)

Overview

Jinja

Stacks2.3K

Followers292

Votes8

GitHub Stars11.2K

Forks1.7K

Flow (JS)

Stacks145

Followers75

Votes0

GitHub Stars22.2K

Forks1.9K

Jinja vs Flow (JS): What are the differences?

What is Jinja? Full featured template engine for Python. It is a full featured template engine for Python. It has full unicode support, an optional integrated sandboxed execution environment, widely used and BSD licensed.

What is Flow (JS)? Flow is a static type checker for Javascript (by Facebook). Flow is a static type checker for Javascript created by Facebook.

Jinja and Flow (JS) are primarily classified as "Templating Languages & Extensions" and "Static Type Checkers" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Jinja are:

Powerful automatic HTML escaping system for cross site scripting prevention
Template inheritance makes it possible to use the same or a similar layout for all templates
High performance with just in time compilation to Python bytecode

On the other hand, Flow (JS) provides the following key features:

Type Inference
Easy Integration
Realtime Feedback

Jinja and Flow (JS) are both open source tools. It seems that Flow (JS) with 20.4K GitHub stars and 1.73K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Jinja with 6.8K GitHub stars and 1.27K GitHub forks.

Uber Technologies, StackStorm, and Stylindex are some of the popular companies that use Jinja, whereas Flow (JS) is used by Instagram, PayFit, and Flexport. Jinja has a broader approval, being mentioned in 36 company stacks & 100 developers stacks; compared to Flow (JS), which is listed in 74 company stacks and 60 developer stacks.

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Advice on Jinja, Flow (JS)

StackShare

Aug 13, 2019

Needs adviceon

TypeScript

CoffeeScript

JavaScript

From a StackShare community member: "We are looking to rewrite our outdated front-end with TypeScript. Right now we have a mix of CoffeeScript and vanilla JavaScript. I have read that adopting TypeScript can help enforce better code quality, and best practices. I also heard good things about Flow (JS). Which one would you recommend and why?"

405k views405k

Comments

Oleksandr

Senior Software Engineer at joyn

Oct 21, 2019

Decided

Initially making a decision to use Flow vs Typescript we decided to go with flow as we wanted our code to run in a way we wrote it, because when using Flow types are simply removed from the code without modifying the code itself. Sadly, the type system of Flow was in some cases very hard to understand and declare the types correctly, especially in cases when the structure is very dynamic (e.g. object keys and values are created dynamically). Another reason was bad integration with IDE and frequent crashes which made DX very poor. Therefore, we made another evaluation of Typescript and decided to move towards it. As our code base was pretty big when we decided to migrate to TS we couldn't just stop and re-write everything, that's why we started writing new modules in Typescript as well as transforming old components. To make that possible we had to configure Webpack loader to support simultaneous bundling of Flow&JS and Typescript. After around 2 months of the transformation we have around 40% of code being written in Typescript and we are more than happy with integration TS has with IDE, as well as ease of declaring types for dynamic modules and functions.

149k views149k

Comments

Vladyslav

Sr. Directory of Technology at Shelf

Oct 25, 2019

Decided

As our codebase grew in size, we were looking for ways to improve code quality. We chose TypeScript over Flow due to its rapid industry adoption and overall tools support.

We noticed how different open-source projects were migrating from Flow to TypeScript. Most notably, it was Jest, even though Jest and Flow were both developed by Facebook. See this HN thread if you want to dive into an interesting discussion around this move.

Additionally, at the beginning of 2019, both Babel and ESLint enabled seamless TypeScript support, which allowed easy migration path in a backward-compatible way.

155k views155k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Jinja	Flow (JS)
It is a full featured template engine for Python. It has full unicode support, an optional integrated sandboxed execution environment, widely used and BSD licensed.	Flow is a static type checker for Javascript created by Facebook.
Powerful automatic HTML escaping system for cross site scripting prevention; Template inheritance makes it possible to use the same or a similar layout for all templates; High performance with just in time compilation to Python bytecode; Translate your template sources on first load into Python bytecode for best runtime performance; Optional ahead-of-time compilation; Easy to debug; Configurable syntax; Template designer helpers	Type Inference; Easy Integration; Realtime Feedback
Statistics
GitHub Stars 11.2K	GitHub Stars 22.2K
GitHub Forks 1.7K	GitHub Forks 1.9K
Stacks 2.3K	Stacks 145
Followers 292	Followers 75
Votes 8	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 8 It is simple to use	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Ember.js Git JavaScript Python Node.js	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Jinja, Flow (JS)?

CoffeeScript

It adds syntactic sugar inspired by Ruby, Python and Haskell in an effort to enhance JavaScript's brevity and readability. Specific additional features include list comprehension and de-structuring assignment.

TypeScript

TypeScript is a language for application-scale JavaScript development. It's a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.

Pug

This project was formerly known as "Jade." Pug is a high performance template engine heavily influenced by Haml and implemented with JavaScript for Node.js and browsers.

Handlebars.js

Handlebars.js is an extension to the Mustache templating language created by Chris Wanstrath. Handlebars.js and Mustache are both logicless templating languages that keep the view and the code separated like we all know they should be.

Mustache

Mustache is a logic-less template syntax. It can be used for HTML, config files, source code - anything. It works by expanding tags in a template using values provided in a hash or object. We call it "logic-less" because there are no if statements, else clauses, or for loops. Instead there are only tags. Some tags are replaced with a value, some nothing, and others a series of values.

Slim Lang

Slim is a template language whose goal is to reduce the view syntax to the essential parts without becoming cryptic. It started as an exercise to see how much could be removed from a standard html template (<, >, closing tags, etc...). As more people took an interest in Slim, the functionality grew and so did the flexibility of the syntax.

RactiveJS

Ractive was originally created at theguardian.com to produce news applications. Ractive takes your Mustache templates and transforms them into a lightweight representation of the DOM – then when your data changes, it intelligently updates the real DOM.

EJS

It is a simple templating language that lets you generate HTML markup with plain JavaScript. No religiousness about how to organize things. No reinvention of iteration and control-flow. It's just plain JavaScript.

Twig

It is a modern template engine for PHP. It is flexible, fast, and secure. Its syntax originates from Jinja and Django templates.

Nunjucks

Rich Powerful language with block inheritance, autoescaping, macros, asynchronous control, and more. Heavily inspired by jinja2. It supports all modern browsers.