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....
Not that long ago I gave a ThoughtWorks geek night presentation on Post-Redirect-Get and how to mess with the Spring Framework to make it happen. I've put up the presentation and the code that I used for it on GitHub. Feedback is always welcome....
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 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....