Suvarna Garge (Editor)

Thymeleaf

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Developer(s)
  
Daniel Fernández

Written in
  
Java

Standard(s)
  
XML, XHTML, HTML5

Development status
  
Active

Operating system
  
Cross-platform

Stable release
  
3.0.2 / September 28, 2016 (2016-09-28)

Thymeleaf is a Java XML/XHTML/HTML5 template engine that can work both in web (Servlet-based) 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.

Contents

In web applications Thymeleaf aims to be a complete substitute for JSP, 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 (offline) environments. No hard dependency on the Servlet API.
  • Based on modular feature sets called dialects.
  • Dialect features (e.g.: evaluation, iteration, etc.) are applied by linking them to template's tags and/or attributes.
  • Two dialects available out-of-the-box: Standard and SpringStandard (for Spring MVC apps, same syntax as Standard).
  • 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 (and extensible) 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 (optional) 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<Product> variable called all Products.

    This piece of code includes:

  • Internationalization expressions: #{ ... } rh
  • Variable/model-attribute evaluation expressions: ${ ... }
  • Utility functions: #numbers.formatDecimal( ... )

    • Also, this fragment of (X)HTML code can be perfectly displayed by a browser as a prototype, without being executed at all: it is a natural template.

    References

    Thymeleaf Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA