Free htmltemplate is a high-performance HTML templating engine written in 100% Java. The design of the templating language is borrowed from the excellent HTML::Template Perl module.
This engine aims for simple and natural separation of HTML and Java. The HTML is stored in files called "templates", containing ordinary HTML extended with a few template-specific HTML-like tags -- <TMPL_VAR>, <TMPL_LOOP>, <TMPL_INCLUDE>, and <TMPL_IF>.
The Java code instantiates a template object from the file and uses a simple API to feed it with run-time data (typically, but not necessarily obtained from a database). When the processing is initiated, the data gets inserted at the appropriate places in the template.
The template itself contains no Java code: only HTML and the templating tags. In other words, running the template only involves traversing its structure and appending text to the output.
Because of that, web designers can safely edit the template contents without any risk of accidentally breaking the system or the logic behind a page.
The package supports nearly all the features of HTML::Template, plus several more. It supports transparent caching of pre-parsed templates, as well as their explicit management if that's desired.
