Install

Latte is available on npm (browser version coming soon). Install globally:

npm install -g latte

...or locally:

npm install --save-dev latte

Usage

On the command line:

$ latte --help
Latte.js compiler.
Usage: latte [options] [--] files...

Options:
  -c, --compile  Compile input files. If not specified, evaluates the files.
  -o, --output   Output directory, to be used with --compile.               
  --version      Show version 

With Grunt:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('latte');
grunt.initConfig({
  latte: {
    client: {
      inputDir: 'src/client',
      outputDir: 'lib/client'
    }
  }
});

Let Statement

Latte adds support for the ES6 Let Statement

Functions

Latte adds support for ES6 Arrow Functions. Use like lambdas:

xs.map(x => x * x)

Arrays

Latte adds support for ES6 array comprehensions.

Monads (Promises made beautiful)

Anyone who's done serious work in Node knows that async can be a pain. Latte supports monad constructs to make life simpler again.

Latte's monad construct is inspired by do-notation in Haskell. Monads may sound scary, but really they're just promises, and with latte you can write async code as if it was synchronous.

Basic Usage

jQuery's ajax() returns a promise, so we can use do-notation to make this code look synchronous.

do {
    var result = << jQuery.get('http://example.com');
    alert(result);
}

Bind Operator

The bind operator (<<) is the magic which makes this work. It's a unary operator, which takes any value. If that value evaluates to a promise (an object with a then() method), execution will yield at that point, and resume when the promise is resolved. The value of the expression will then be the resoved value of the promise.

This expression can be used anywhere inside a do {} block. So for the jQuery example above, we could have wrote:

do {
    alert(<< jQuery.get('http://example.com'));
}

Get Involved

Latte is at an early stage of development, and I'm keen to hear any thoughts, suggestions, issues, criticisms, and I welcome contributions!