I’m looking to create a new app from scratch and will probably use Spring MVC and possibly Spring Web Flow. The projects created by Spring Roo use Spring MVC and optionally Web Flow. What are some good alternatives for view technology, or is JSP with Spring and JSTL taglibs and jQuery the way to go?
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Answer
In the standard Java EE API, the only alternative to JSP is Facelets. As far now (2010) JSF is the only MVC framework which natively supports Facelets.
Spring MVC supports out of the box only JSP, but it has a configurable view resolver which allows you to use Facelets anyway. Other candiates are 3rd party templating frameworks such as Velocity, Freemarker, and Thymeleaf which can be configured as a view technology for Spring MVC. Spring documentation has integration examples with Velocity and Freemarker.