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Add to SafariWhen comparing Handlebars.js vs Slim, the Slant community recommends Slim for most people. In the question“What are the best HTML preprocessors?” Slim is ranked 2nd while Handlebars.js is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Slim is:
Slim's documentation is well organized and detailed, every concept is thoroughly explained and it is very helpful for both advanced users and beginners.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Clean syntax
Handlebars's syntax is very readable and easy to understand.
Pro Clear separation of logic and markup
If something is not within {{ and }}, it's not Handlebars. As a result, Handlebars "weaves" through HTML, instead of trying to become an invalid extension of it.
Pro Copy/Paste code from the internet
Examples for Bootstrap or other CSS frameworks are always in HTML. With Handlebards you can just copy and paste the examples in your code. With something like Pug (Jade) you have to convert the HTML to Pug (Jade) first.
Pro Easy to use for templating things other than HTML
The syntax allows the output to be any text and does not contrain the user to HTML output only. There are examples of handlebars being used to produce SQL, javascript and other programming language code.
Pro Easy to use any template also as partials
Templates may be nested and reusable parts can be factored out.
Pro Compiled rather than interpreted templates
Handlebars.js allows you to pre-compile your templates so that the loading time at the client end could be reduced when your templated page is loaded.
Pro Mustache compatible
You can import Mustache templates and add extra functionality, that's provided by Handlebars, on top of them.
Pro Good global helpers support
Pro Logic-less
By design, logic-less templates force you to separate concerns thus helping you avoid future problems with refactoring. It also allow templates to be used with multiple programming languages without changes.
Pro Good paths support
With Handlebars.js you can create bindings with variables inside any path in your application.
Pro Easy to define extensions
With a few lines of code, a new extension (control or templating function) can be implemented. It will be called by the compiled templates.
Pro Well organized and thorough documentation
Slim's documentation is well organized and detailed, every concept is thoroughly explained and it is very helpful for both advanced users and beginners.
Pro A good starting point
Slim is minimal and that is a good thing if you want to start from there. It can be easily extended and even supports popular packages that are used in Laravel (like Illuminate\Database (eloquent)) for example.
Pro REST based
REST fans will love the REST based architecture.
Pro Supports tie-ins for Rack-like middleware
Rack is an interface used in Ruby frameworks used to group and order modules, which most of the time are Ruby classes, and specify between them.
Slim uses a simple concept for it's middleware. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses it unifies the middleware into a single method call.
Pro Useful classes
Contains classes for managing requests, responses, cookies, logging, views, HTTP caching, and more.
Pro Flexible
Slim doesn't demand that you stick to a fixed folder structure. As long as you load Slim the right way you can do anything from there the way you like it.
Pro Extremely lightweight
Paired with swoole it's a micro service powerhouse.
Pro Open source
The Slim Framework is open source and is released under the MIT public license
Pro Extremely customizable
You can add any dependency, package or class that you want to use as a contained dependency.
Pro Supports Php 5.3 and PHP 7
Pro Makes it easy to understand the way some abstract functions and classes are built
In Django most things are abstracted, you just call some function or class without knowing how they were built, but with Slim, you end up understanding the way some abstract functions and classes are built.
Pro Hooks for executing code at different points in its life-cycle
Slim supports code hooks for executing functions at different points in time during the application's lifecycle.
Cons
Con Hard to use documentation
Although the documentation exists and is fairly comprehensive, it's not always clearly written, and there is no search capacity.
Con Handlebars are still an HTML code
Handlebars use the standard HTML syntax with its own {{tags}} for templating. This doesn't add much to readability or design speed.
Con Using partials is cumbersome
"In order to use a partial, it must be registered" using some JavaScript method attached to some global variable.
Con Not much editor support
Handlebars.js doesn't seem to have many text editors that support things like auto-complete, syntax highlighting or error checking for it.
Con Does not play well with Angular.js
.. or any framework where you wish to compile handlebars.js template to the template understanable by the framework.
Con Very little consistency among different versions
There have been quite some changes that break the compatibility between Slim 2 and Slim 3. Even if you learned how to work with the Slim 2, you will find that Slim 3 requires re-training.
Con Dependency injection is too weak
It is not really dependency injection, but just a configurable container.
Con Needs strong bases to create dependencies
The dependency container schema of Slim is one of the biggest PROS and CONS of the framework. It is true that this schema brings so much flexibility to add anything, but another thing that is true is that you need to have strong bases of patterns, and an extensive knowledge of your libraries to convert it into a Slim dependency.
Con Too minimal
While it's true that Slim is a microframework, it's still too minimal. When used for throwaway projects or simple prototypes, it's perfect. But in the long run, it becomes less and less useful and you end up in implementing a full custom framework in trying to tackle all the missing features.
