Tuesday, July 24, 2007

[Tech] Template Engine Stagnation?

Frank Sommers discusses several new attempts in template-engine design and implementations like String Template, the Rails approach, Velocity and the like. Gert Bevin introduces this article in TheServerside.com with the words:

"Template engines seem to be one of the most stagnant technologies in Java".

Actually this question is quite interesting for me, as I made the same observation over the last years. Maybe the answer is very simple though: The reason might be, because they are actually not often used and hence there is not much demand.

For XML related processing XSLT is a proven and powerful technology; Web-Development apparently moves away from template-based approaches as new frameworks like Wicket or Google Web Toolkit show. Then there are some minor application scenarios where template engines are used in the "backend" like generation of Java code by O/R mappers or generating SQL statements and the like. But most developers use strategies one abstraction layer above. Meaning: you do not put your SQL statements together with Velocity, you might use Hibernate or Cayenne.

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