Rails 3.1 uses sprockets for its asset pipeline. Rails 3.1 has shown considerable love for SCSS and SASS but has left HAML out. We at Dharana Software Innovations are die hard HAML fans. We beleive that it is the best templating language around. So we would like to have it as a part of our client side toolkit as well. The haml-js project does exactly that. It was written for Node.js but works well with the browser too.
The gem includes haml-js. You would not have to download it separately. To use this gem, you need to do the following.
In the Gemfile, add the following line.
gem "haml-sprockets"
Now, you can create hamljs files under app/assets/javascripts/templates folder. You can create the templates folder, if it does not already exist.
// code for app/assets/javascripts/templates/hello.jst.hamljs
%h1 Hello HAML
You can now access the template anywhere in your javascript or coffeescript code.
JST["templates/hello"]()
This should give you back the string "<h1>Hello HAML</h1>".
This is distributed under the MIT license.