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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Templating Languages & Extensions
  4. Templating Languages And Extensions
  5. GraphQL vs Mustache

GraphQL vs Mustache

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Mustache
Mustache
Stacks2.4K
Followers415
Votes50
GitHub Stars16.7K
Forks2.4K
GraphQL
GraphQL
Stacks34.9K
Followers28.1K
Votes309

GraphQL vs Mustache: What are the differences?

What is GraphQL? A data query language and runtime. GraphQL is a data query language and runtime designed and used at Facebook to request and deliver data to mobile and web apps since 2012.

What is Mustache? Logic-less templates. 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.

GraphQL and Mustache are primarily classified as "Query Languages" and "Templating Languages & Extensions" tools respectively.

"Schemas defined by the requests made by the user" is the primary reason why developers consider GraphQL over the competitors, whereas "Dead simple templating" was stated as the key factor in picking Mustache.

GraphQL and Mustache are both open source tools. Mustache with 13.2K GitHub stars and 2.3K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than GraphQL with 11.7K GitHub stars and 753 GitHub forks.

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are some of the popular companies that use GraphQL, whereas Mustache is used by Twitter, Trello, and Kickstarter. GraphQL has a broader approval, being mentioned in 559 company stacks & 748 developers stacks; compared to Mustache, which is listed in 231 company stacks and 18 developer stacks.

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Advice on Mustache, GraphQL

Raj
Raj

Oct 10, 2020

Review

It purely depends on your app needs. Does it need to be scalable, do you have lots of features, OR it is a simple project with very simple needs - many of those parameters clarify which technologies will fit.

If you are looking for a quick solution, that reduces lot of development time, take a look at postgraphile (https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/). You have to just define the schema and you get the entire graph-ql apis built for you and you can just focus on your frontend.

On frontend, React is good, but also need to remember that it is popular because it introduced one way data writes and in-built virtual dom + diffing to determine which dom to modify. Though personally I liked it, am recently more inclined to Svelte because its lightweightedness and absence of virtual dom and its simplicity compared to the huge ecosystem that React has surrounded itself with.

In all situations, frameworks keep changing over time. What is best today is not considered even good few years from now. What is important is to have the logic in a separate, clean manner void of too many framework related dependencies - that way you can switch one framework with another very easily.

3.76k views3.76k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Mustache
Mustache
GraphQL
GraphQL

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.

GraphQL is a data query language and runtime designed and used at Facebook to request and deliver data to mobile and web apps since 2012.

-
Hierarchical;Product-centric;Client-specified queries;Backwards Compatible;Structured, Arbitrary Code;Application-Layer Protocol;Strongly-typed;Introspective
Statistics
GitHub Stars
16.7K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
2.4K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
2.4K
Stacks
34.9K
Followers
415
Followers
28.1K
Votes
50
Votes
309
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 29
    Dead simple templating
  • 12
    Open source
  • 8
    Small
  • 1
    Support in lots of languages
Pros
  • 75
    Schemas defined by the requests made by the user
  • 63
    Will replace RESTful interfaces
  • 62
    The future of API's
  • 49
    The future of databases
  • 12
    Get many resources in a single request
Cons
  • 4
    Hard to migrate from GraphQL to another technology
  • 4
    More code to type.
  • 2
    Takes longer to build compared to schemaless.
  • 1
    No support for caching
  • 1
    No built in security

What are some alternatives to Mustache, GraphQL?

TypeScript

TypeScript

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

Pug

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

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.

Prisma

Prisma

Prisma is an open-source database toolkit. It replaces traditional ORMs and makes database access easy with an auto-generated query builder for TypeScript & Node.js.

Slim Lang

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.

PostGraphile

PostGraphile

Execute one command (or mount one Node.js middleware) and get an instant high-performance GraphQL API for your PostgreSQL database

OData

OData

It is an ISO/IEC approved, OASIS standard that defines a set of best practices for building and consuming RESTful APIs. It helps you focus on your business logic while building RESTful APIs without having to worry about the various approaches to define request and response headers, status codes, HTTP methods, URL conventions, media types, payload formats, query options, etc.

RactiveJS

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

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.

Jinja

Jinja

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.

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