Blog

Here’s a quick way to get you started with FreeMarker. You will need Eclipse Indigo and the m2e Maven Plugin for Eclipse. You will also need a basic understanding of Spring 3 MVC, as we will convert the Spring MVC view from JSPs to FreeMarker.

1. Create a new Maven Project using the Eclipse New Wizard. When prompted for the archetype, pick the spring-mvc-jpa-archetype. This will give us a running Spring MVC web application.

2. Enter com.teamextension for the groupId. Enter quickfreemarker for the artifactId. Enter com.teamextension.quickfreemarker for the package. Hit Finish.

So far we have created a basic Spring MVC web application. Next step is to add FreeMarker support.

3. Right click on the quickfreemarker project and go to Maven -> Add Dependency. Enter the pattern freemarker and pick the org.freemarker freemarker.

This adds the FreeMarker library to our Spring MVC application.

4. Go to src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/spring/app/servlet-context.xml and make the following changes.

Remove the org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver bean and replace it with

<beans:bean id="freemarkerConfig" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.freemarker.FreeMarkerConfigurer">
	<beans:property name="templateLoaderPath" value="/WEB-INF/views/"/>
</beans:bean>

<beans:bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.freemarker.FreeMarkerViewResolver">
	<beans:property name="cache" value="true"/>
	<beans:property name="prefix" value=""/>
	<beans:property name="suffix" value=".ftl"/>
</beans:bean>

This changes the ViewResolver from using JSPs to FreeMarker.

5. Now we change the JSPs. Go to src/main/webapp//WEB-INF/views. Rename home.jsp to home.ftl, and then remove the 2 JSP directives on the top of home.ftl.

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>
<%@ page session="false" %>

6. Edit src/main/resources/log4j.xml. Look for “org.application” and change it to “com.teamextension”. This will enable debug logging for our web application.

7. Run mvn tomcat:run to test your web application. Here we will create an Eclipse run configuration for Maven so we can run tomcat:run from within Eclipse.

8. Go to http://localhost:8080/quickfreemarker to see your web application in action.

9. For development purposes, you might want to disable caching. Change the cache property in the viewResolver bean to false.

	<beans:property name="cache" value="false"/>

Now you have a fully configured Spring 3 MVC + FreeMarker web application. For a more in-depth look at FreeMarker, please read the official FreeMarker Manual and the Spring MVC View page.