Tiles vs Veocity vs Template Engines

[ibnaziz]

Hi All,

I am new to this area and have been using jsp/jstl most of the time, but realise some of the drawbacks. Hence, investigating other options. I have managed to briefly look at 'Tiles' and like what I have seen so far.... but before I venture too far, I would like some general advice. I mean what is currently the most popular front end technology to use with Spring.. Tiles, Velocity... or just plain old jsp/jstl ?

much appreciated.

[sami25]

Hi,

if you are looking for flexible layouts of a webpage to be managed,

there are two solutions one is tiles and the other sitemesh , maybe there are others ,

Velocity is certainly a templating engine , but doesnt fit very well for the above problem.

[ibnaziz]

in that case maybe I should be asking what is the difference between Tiles and Velocity first.... I thought they two solutions to the same problem... but you mentioned the opposite... so if tiles is not a templating engine what is it ?

much appreciated

[davison]

Tiles is a layout engine that allows you to create re-usable areas of screens (like menus, footers, advert panels and so on). Velocity is a templating language. It makes little sense to compare the two.

Velocity can be used as a JSP/JSTL replacement in the web tier, although it has no dependencies on the servlet API like JSP does. You often find velocity employed as a templating engine for email bodies that applications send out for example.

The 2 main advantages velocity used to have in the web tier over JSP were speed and cleaner syntax. With more recent JSP engines and the standardisation of JSTL, these are probably negated.

Tiles should be compared with Sitemesh, and Velocity with FreeMarker or JSP/JSTL.

D.