Instant FreeMarker Starter

Structure your enterprise-class projects with FreeMarker!

Overview

• Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results.
• Build realistic enterprise projects on your own
• Create your first template with FreeMarker
• Learn how to integrate with the Struts2 and Spring frameworks

In Detail

Generating completed text documents by filling in blanks on a template is as old as printing, but this simple and straightforward approach to creating web pages and other computer-generated text using FreeMarker has only recently begun to gain popularity.

Instant FreeMarker Starter uses hands-on, real-world examples to show how to master its features, integrate with your web application framework, and effectively incorporate a template engine into your next enterprise project.

This guide gets you started quickly, showing you how you can begin using FreeMarker in less than a dozen lines of code. From there, it covers key features and shows you how FreeMarker integrates with popular MVC frameworks.

The core of the book walks you through the development of a program that generates a monthly newsletter from a complex data model. Along the way, you will learn strategies for organizing your FreeMarker logic in large enterprise projects. After covering the capabilities of FreeMarker, the book will show you how to integrate it with popular web application frameworks.

In short, the book will take your novice experience with FreeMarker to a level wherein you will create your own FreeMarker-based project.

What you will learn from this book

• Load and process templates
• How expressions access a data model
• Create and use macros and functions
• Control the formatting of different data types
• Handle errors and missing data
• Loop over repeating content
• Control complexity by breaking templates into fragments and libraries
• Regulate output with logical operations and conditionals
• Use JUnit to test your templates
• Integrate with frameworks such as Struts2 and Spring
• Migrate from legacy JSP technology

Approach

Get to grips with a new technology, understand what it is and what it can do for you, and then get to work with the most important features and tasks.A simple Starter approach introducing new concepts and terms through the hands-on building of templates for Java APIs.

Who this book is written for

If you are a dynamic web developer or a Java-based apps developer new to FreeMarker, then this book will provide invaluable guidance to get your new project started on the right track. If you have started using FreeMarker and find it confusing or complicated, this book will be a guided tour that will show you how to conquer complexity and create a template-based view layer with an elegant architecture.

The book is also aimed at those who have elementary web development skills and basic Java programming knowledge. Readers should also have a conceptual understanding of the MVC model.