HTML templates

[Dan P]

Our web team is shifting development from Perl to Java; we are Java newbies. We need to pick a template engine to add dynamic content to HTML templates. We are considering limited scripting languages (such as Velocity, WebMacro, FreeMarker) and "ports" of the Perl HTML::Template module (several of these are listed on Freshmeat.net).

We very much appreciate hearing of any real world experience with these tools or any feedback on their quality or utility.

Thank you,

Dan Pelton
American Mathematical Society

 

[Andrea Spinelli]

We very much appreciate hearing of any real world experience with
these tools or any feedback on their quality or utility.

We have been using for a couple of years the HTML.Template port
which is

Copyright (c) 2002 Philip S Tellis ([email protected])

The general impression is absolutely good. No problem ever.
We also added another TMPL_GENERIC tag, which calls arbitrary
Java Code, much as custom JSP tags.

The only glitch is the use of Hashtable (pre-deprecated)
instead of the more sexy HashMap - but who cares, after all?

HTML.Template was great for quickly porting code which
originally was in Perl. With afterthought, we could have used JSP
tags (standard+custom) for obtaining approximately the same effect,
at the cost of reading a lot of docs for doing an extremely simple job.

If you are porting a working thing, do not bother and use HTML.Template!
If you are developing from scratch, mayge a JSP architecture could
be a better choice (more support...)

Good luck
Andrea

 

[Roedy Green]

Our web team is shifting development from Perl to Java; we are Java newbies. We need to pick a template engine to add dynamic content to HTML templates. We are considering limited scripting languages (such as Velocity, WebMacro, FreeMarker) and "ports" of the Perl HTML::Template module (several of these are listed on Freshmeat.net).

We very much appreciate hearing of any real world experience with these tools or any feedback on their quality or utility.

the most commonly used one is JSP using various tag libraries.

You might look into Freemarker which is simpler. See
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/freemarker.html

You also might look into JSF
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jsf.html

It might not hurt to give each one a test drive on a simple project to
see how well it fits your needs. This is not a decision you can easily
change later.