[evanphx]

It's very true that things like timeouts are done better within the client library. But Templar can combine timeouts with caching, allowing an API to appear to still be active and returning something even when it's just very slow.

Because a cache is best when it's populated often, it make sense to put that into a service that many different processes on different machines can use.

Everything within templar can be done by adding capabilities to client libraries, no argument. But most client libraries don't provide these capabilities in one programming language, let alone many of them. By having the functional available as a service, Templar provides these capabilities fairly transparently (and even more transparently in the future when there is per/host and per/url configuration).