I'm making this announcement because I consider that it is of general interest to Struts users who are investigating other view technologies (i.e. alternatives to JSP).
A new preview release of FreeMarker 2.3 is available. Though it's a preview, at this point, FM 2.3 is really approaching its final state.
FreeMarker is a well known template engine written in 100% pure Java. It is used as a component in various web application frameworks, such as JPublish, Niggle, Open for Business, and Tammi. Also, FreeMarker can be configured for use as the view layer for model 2 web frameworks, of which Struts is the best known example. Here is a link to the manual page that explains how to configure FreeMarker for use in conjunction with Struts:
http://freemarker.org/docs/pgui_misc_servlet.html
With the 2.3 release cycle, FreeMarker continues to get better. FreeMarker 2.2 introduced clean support for JSP taglibs. One user raved that he was amazed that it was actually simpler and more straightforward to use JSP taglibs from FreeMarker templates than from JSP's! What this means, of course, is that Struts users can migrate from JSP->FM without losing any investment they may have in JSP taglibs (their own or from third parties.)
In FreeMarker 2.3, the new visit and recurse directives may well make it
easier to do recursive XSLT-style transformations in FreeMarker than with XSLT itself!
FM 2.3 also adds some other appealing new features, such as the ability to use variable interpolations in string literals, and the ability to define functions with return values in the template language.
In short, for those of you who are open to making your lives simpler by finding more usable alternatives to better-known (and more widely-hyped) technologies such as JSP and XSLT, FreeMarker really deserves some serious attention.
For more information, visit http://freemarker.org/ (or http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/) or the FreeMarker project page at http://sf.net/projects/freemarker .
Best Regards,
Jonathan Revusky
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