My team is currently exploring Freemarker as a web view and template language. “Jsp is overkill for what we need”, “no code snippets in view code”, “it supports tag libraries”, “the macros are powerful” were all listed as top benefits. In addition, there is some interest in developing tests that validate the output of views.I’m scratching my head on this one. Another template language? I used Velocity in my last project and even dropped some hints in this blog on using Velocity with Eclipse. Velocity is good for creating email templates, but I would never recommend using it as a front end for a website.So why will Freemarker be better? Why do I want to prevent developers from using snippets? Can’t I just implement development standards instead of using a template language to enforce good programming techniques? What’s so bad about just using a standard like JSP? And will Freemarker be around in three years or will it be superseded by the next latest and greatest template language?
Welcome to Drive
Drive has 700+ articles for digital transformation leaders written by StarCIO Digital Trailblazer, Isaac Sacolick. Learn more.
Published on:
Topics:
Share on:
My company, StarCIO, provides leadership, learning, and advisory programs for companies looking to accelerate delivering business value from digital transformation. Contact me if you’d like to learn more about partnering opportunities.
Join us for a future session of Coffee with Digital Trailblazers, where we discuss topics for aspiring transformation leaders. If you enjoy my thought leadership, please sign up for the Driving Digital Newsletter and read all about my transformation stories in Digital Trailblazer.
Digital Trailblazers! Join us Fridays at 11am ET for a live audio discussion on digital transformation topics: innovation, product management, agile, DevOps, data governance, and more!
3 comments:
-
I completely agree; I recently worked with ‘clean’ jsp ‘s and I see nothing wrong with them compared to freemarker or similar.
Unless you use scriptlets a lot, of course! -
Jive software switched from using JSP to FreeMarker. You can read about their reasons and experience here and here.
-
I was reasonably satisfied with JSP and on the lookout for the perfect templating language until I discovered Apache Wicket.
Now I firmly believe that the bandwagon had been going in the wrong direction all these years. IMHO using pure Java code is the logical way to build a complex user interface instead of learning yet another templating language or diving into tag soup.
With Wicket the ‘separation of concerns’ is perfect as well with pure HTML used for layout.
You may be interested in reading this blog post about why I switched from JSPs to Wicket.
Leave a Reply