Let's start by talking about the templates we use for our view classes. In the previous chapter, we've put our template source text right in the index.ejs file, inside script tags. This time we're going to do something different. We're going to precompile our templates. Think about the timeline of a template; it starts as text in a script tag. We've been getting that text and passing it to the _.template function that compiles the text into a template function, which it returns to us. Then, we pass our data to that function and get the HTML with our data interpolated back. All this must be done before we can display anything for the user.

What we want to do is cut a few steps out of this process. We want to send the template function to the browser, instead of sending the template text and having the browser compile it. To do this, we need to compile the templates as part of our development process.

The easiest way to do this is to use Grunt, a handy build...