Jakarta Commons Cookbook

9.14. Using FreeMarker in a Web Application

Problem

You would like to use FreeMarker templates in a web application.

Solution

FreeMarker ships with a FreemarkerServlet, which can be configured to render your FreeMarker templates. To configure this servlet, add the following servlet and servlet-mapping elements to your web.xml file:

<servlet>
  <servlet-name>freemarker</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>freemarker.ext.servlet.FreemarkerServlet</servlet-class>
  <init-param>
    <param-name>TemplatePath</param-name>
    <param-value>/</param-value>
  </init-param>
  <init-param>
    <param-name>NoCache</param-name>
    <param-value>true</param-value>
  </init-param>
  <init-param>
    <param-name>ContentType</param-name>
    <param-value>text/html</param-value>
  </init-param>
  <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
  <servlet-name>freemarker</servlet-name>
  <url-pattern>*.ftl</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Discussion

If your application contains custom JSP tag libraries, these tag libraries can be used from a FreeMarker template. To see how a JSP tag library can be used in FreeMarker, take a look at the following JSP page, which references an app tag library with a TLD file in /WEB-INF/app-taglib.tld:

<%@page language="java"%>
<%@taglib uri="/WEB-INF/app-taglib.tld" prefix="app"%>

<p>
 This is an HTML page with a taglib in it.
</p>

<app:printStuff var="test" mode="fast"/>

The app tag library has a printStuff tag, which takes the parameters var and mode. The same tag can be used in a FreeMarker template ...