Should I use Thymeleaf or JSP for the HTML layer?

[dijkstra]

I'm creating a webapp using Spring MVC, and I already programmed some JSPs for displaying data...

The problem is that some colleagues of mine talked to me about a template engine project called Thymeleaf [ http://www.thymeleaf.org ], and I read this comparison between it and JSP http://www.thymeleaf.org/thvsjsp.html and it looks so good!

Nevertheless, it still seems to be in beta, so I'd like to ask: does anyone know it? Anyone there already using it? Any words about advantages/disadvantages with JSP?

Thanks!

[Grzegorz Grzybek]

Although I don't have any experience from real projects (it's on the top of my libs-to-check-list), I would recommend Thymeleaf as a templating engine - it's somehow similar to Velocity, especially in that its implementation is not a part of application server but can be included in your WEB-INF/lib and it's a good thing. Also it seams more integrated with Spring (SpEL, plugins) than Velocity.
Let me know how it worked for you!

regards
Grzegorz Grzybek

[dijkstra]

Thank you. I am reading the tutorial and it looks much better than JSP, especially the internationalization tools and HTML5 support. Anyway, for using it in my project I think I'll probably wait until they release a stable version because don't want to have API changes, and being a beta these might happen...

[dfernandez]

Hi,

Thanks for your interest in Thymeleaf. I am the author of this library, and I just wanted to let you know that the first stable version (1.0.0) will be released very soon (most probably in just a couple of weeks).

I hope you like the technology. I am pretty sure that once you learn it you will never feel the need to go back to JSP again!

Regards,
Daniel.

[javaloper]

Also i started to use thymeleaf framework. Maybe by the time it can be part of springsource mvc

[Grzegorz Grzybek]

I've written in July that I'm going to use Thymeleaf. It's February 2012 and I'm happy to say that Thymeleaf is now a view technology in large, governmental web application in Poland! It works like a charm! With natural templating I've prototyped some HTML pages, used them in a project document and then, without any converters, generators I've used these templates in final version!

Log messages are wonderful, it's all clear and beautiful - as I say - "zero entropy" - no chaos (as with JSPs and taglibs/tagdirs). I have one template named "_controls.html" which contains all form controls (text, dates, ...) which use jquery - and gues what - the work offline (just opened in browser) too!

So everyone - start using Thymeleaf!