Default HTML-escape using Freemarker

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....

Conversations with Spring

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 views for Spring

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....

Example J2EE application

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....