Jim Kingdon's Java page

Rendering HTML

In writing a web application in java, one task is to render HTML. Most ways of doing this, such as velocity, jsp, and XSLT, have drawbacks. It is hard to navigate and refactor them, because tools like eclipse and IDEA don't have the same support as for java. They all have their own non-Java syntax to cope with. What's the solution?

• If you want a template system, Tiny Template is a nice simple open source one. Download the java version, give it a try, and send me some patches.
• But my sympathies are mainly with a Plain Old Java Object (POJO) HTML renderer. They're not that hard to write, which is one reason that this wheel has been reinvented at a number of jobs I've been on. One that has made it to a public web site is from Brian Slesinsky (that code is for Java 1.5, but the general concept would work fine in 1.4 as well. I didn't see any explicit license, but I suspect Brian intends to open source it).