Most java developers have at least heard of Freemarker. FreeMarker is a “template engine”; a generic tool to generate text output (anything from HTML to autogenerated source code) based on templates. It’s a Java package, a class library for Java programmers. It’s not an application for end-users in itself, but something that programmers can embed into their products. It is the “generic” nature of Freemarker that trips up java web developers....
I've uploaded to GitHub (http://github.com/tomcz/pico-webapp/tree/master) the web application that I use to teach people about dependency injection (using PicoContainer), post-redirect-get browser interaction, RESTful URIs and strict template rendering (using StringTemplate). This application does not use Spring Framework by deliberate design - as soon as I introduce it to any teaching session I spend more time talking about Spring then talking about what I am usually there to accomplish. As usual, any comments, bugs or enhancement requests are very welcome....
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....