Template Engine in Java

• Style

  The templating style is similar to PHP's Smarty Templates.

  The Engine supports the following tag identifiers:

  • Single-Brace (smarty default):

    { $foo }

  • Double-Brace (javascript friendly):

    {{ $foo }}

  • Angle-Percent (asp-like):

    <% $foo %>

• Suitable for rending any textual content

  • XML
  • HTML
  • Plain Text

• Encourages well-formatted templates

  • Works very hard to remove extra whitespace introduced by template tags

  • When consistent indentation is used, it is preserved

    For example, this template snippet

    {* indentations due to well-formatted block tags will be removed *}
    {capture id='body'}
    	{set $list=['one', 'two', 'three']}
    	{foreach id=item in=$list loop=loop}
    		{if $loop.first}
    			# Start List
    		{/if}
    			{* This tab preserved *}
    			[{$loop.iteration}] {$item}
    		{if $loop.last}
    			# End List
    		{/if}
    	{/}
    {/capture}
    {$body}
    

    Renders this well-formatted output

    # Start List
    	[1] one
    	[2] two
    	[3] three
    # End List
    

• Caching

  The Engine supports EHCache hi-performance cache for storage of tokenized templates.

  If you decide not to use the EHCache, the Engine will employ a temporary cache using a hashtable of weak references. This is used to ensure that included templates are only tokenized once when processing the main template.

• Macros

  You can capture a template (or portion of) in tokenized form and render it multiple times.

    {macro id='macro'}
    	Hello, {$name}
    {/macro}
    {set name='foo'}
    {$macro}
    {set name='bar'}
    {$macro}
  

• A Simple Coding Example
• Standard tags, filters and functions
• Configuring the template engine
• Creating your own tag library

• Jars needed to build & run the Engine

  • Activation (1.1.1)

  • ANTLR (2.7.7)

  • Commons BeanUtils (1.8.3) Collections

  • Commons Beanutils (1.8.3) Core

  • Commons Logging (1.1.1)

  • EHCache (2.2.0) Core

  • JAXB API (2.2.1 20100511)

  • JAXB IMPL (2.2.1 20100511)

    NOTE: When building from source, these jars should be placed into a folder named

    / path / to / distribution / lib /

• Jars needed just for building

  • JAXB XJC (2.2.1 20100511)

    NOTE: When building from source, this jar should be placed into a folder named

    / path / to / distribution / lib-build /

• View the source code on GitHub
• Download Source/Binary Distributions

• David Farrell