No One Is Perfect » spring http://watchitlater.com/blog A reluctant foray into the world of blogging. Sun, 05 Sep 2010 07:27:05 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 StringTemplate views for Spring http://watchitlater.com/blog/2010/09/stringtemplate-views-for-spring/ http://watchitlater.com/blog/2010/09/stringtemplate-views-for-spring/#comments Sun, 05 Sep 2010 07:27:02 +0000 Tom http://watchitlater.com/blog/?p=226 StringTemplate is a great templating engine. It’s powerful, simple and quite opinionated. I’ve come really appreciate its simple purpose: render data. No assignment, no arbitrary method invocation. It is not Turing-complete and it would make a lousy rules engine.

SiteMesh is a web-page layout and decoration framework that is my current “golden hammer” when I need to provide a consistent layout across a java web-application. It seems to fit with the way that I think about web pages a whole lot more than something like Tiles – I really prefer decoration over composition as a means of layout control.

I’ve used StringTemplate it in the past on java projects and for a while have wanted to create a way to integrate it with Spring Framework’s MVC so I can stop using Freemarker and Velocity in Spring-heavy projects. Not that Freemarker is that bad, it’s just that I really don’t need or want all of the bells and whistles that come with it and allow it to be so frequently misused. All I really want is a templating engine that renders the model and does not get in my way. It just so happens that SiteMesh also makes an appearance on these projects and I’ve been wanting to use StringTemplate to provide layout decorators as well as Spring views.

Today I’ve released version 1.0 of my spring-stringtemplate integration library as a GitHub project. It provides an implementation of a Spring MVC View and ViewResolver for StringTemplate, and a decorator servlet for SiteMesh.

Feedback is always welcome.

]]> http://watchitlater.com/blog/2010/09/stringtemplate-views-for-spring/feed/ 2 Example J2EE application http://watchitlater.com/blog/2009/06/example-j2ee-application/ http://watchitlater.com/blog/2009/06/example-j2ee-application/#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:43:57 +0000 Tom http://watchitlater.com/blog/?p=41 I hate maven with an almost homicidal passion. It only works if your brain works like maven, for the rest of us in the real world its just a pain in the arse. But it does have one good idea – it provides a simple, out of the box way of creating a project structure (but so do rails, django and grails in a much better way). I’ve decided to publish my own example web application project/structure on GitHub – http://github.com/tomcz/example-webapp/tree/master. This is my idea bucket for how to create, configure and code web applications, and gives me a source for downloads when I’m coaching or starting a new project. This release represents some of the ideas that I have either encountered or am experimenting with at any given moment. At the moment I’m concentrating on post-redirect-get, RESTful URLs, robust database connections, Spring 3 and StringTemplate.

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