Re: evaluating templating engines

Thursday, July 3, 2008, 11:23:42 PM, neerashish wrote:

> I am evalutaing templating engines for my next project and freemarker is
> coming up high on th list.
>
> Few questions:
>
> 1) Which is the highest traffic site that you know of using freemarker?

I don't know, but technically it doesn't mater either, given that the
complexity of the templates is quite important factor. BTW, note the
section near the end of this page:
http://freemarker.org/poweredBy.html

> 2) From docuemntation it seems, with freemarker I can use JSP tags . Does
> that mean I am using JSP underneath or just the JSP syntax?

You can use JSP taglibs as if they were a library of user-defined
FreeMarker directives (often referred as an FTL library). So the
syntax remains the FreeMarker syntax, only the directives that you are
calling are *implemented* as JSP taglibs. (For this to work FreeMarker
has to be configured specially, given the requirements and assumptions
of JSP taglibs. Namely, they expect to be in Servlet environment, they
expect that the templates access certain Servlet-specific "scopes",
and that we have a page scope too, etc. FreeMarker expects basically
nothing, so it can accommodate to many things.)

> 3) Why allow JSP syntax?

I think it's somewhat incompatible with FreeMarker semantic. Also an
important point of the whole FreeMarker thing was that it uses a
terser syntax than JSP, so...

>    a) To reduce learning curve of people coming from JSP
>    b) easy to migrate from freemarker to JSP in future

WHAT? From freemarker to JSP??? :) If it would be easily possible on
that direction too, then the two tool had to be basically the same,
and especially if their syntax would be the same as we;;... there
would be little reason for both exist.

>    c) JSP just has a better tag library

That's independent of the syntax. (See earlier.)

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


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