Thymeleaf


Thymeleaf is a Java XML/XHTML/HTML5 template engine that can work both in web and non-web environments. It is better suited for serving XHTML/HTML5 at the view layer of MVC-based web applications, but it can process any XML file even in offline environments. It provides full Spring Framework integration.
In web applications Thymeleaf aims to be a complete substitute for JavaServer Pages, and implements the concept of Natural Templates: template files that can be directly opened in browsers and that still display correctly as web pages.
Thymeleaf is open-source software, licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

Features

From the project's website:
  • Java template engine for XML, XHTML and HTML5.
  • Works both in web and non-web environments. No hard dependency on the Servlet API.
  • Based on modular feature sets called dialects.
  • * Dialect features are applied by linking them to template's tags and/or attributes.
  • * Two dialects available out-of-the-box: Standard and SpringStandard.
  • * Developers can extend and create custom dialects.
  • Several template modes:
  • * XML: validating against a DTD or not.
  • * XHTML 1.0 and 1.1: validating against standard DTDs or not.
  • * HTML5: both XML-formed code and legacy-based HTML5. Legacy non-XML code will be automatically cleaned and converted to XML form.
  • Full internationalization support.
  • Configurable, high performance parsed template cache that reduces input/output to the minimum.
  • Automatic DOCTYPE translations –from template DTD to result DTD– for validation of both template and result code.
  • Extremely extensible: can be used as a template engine framework if needed.
  • Complete documentation including several example applications.

Thymeleaf example

The following example produces an HTML5 table with rows for each item of a List variable called allProducts.














Name Price
Oranges 0.99


This piece of code includes:
  • Internationalization expressions: # rh
  • Variable/model-attribute evaluation expressions: $
  • Utility functions: #numbers.formatDecimal
Also, this fragment of HTML code can be perfectly displayed by a browser as a prototype, without being processed at all: it is a natural template.