Why would I use a templating engine? jsp include and jstl vs tiles, freemarker, velocity, sitemesh

Question

I\'m about to choose to way to organize my view (with spring-mvc, but that shouldn\'t matter much)

There are 6 options as far as I see (though they are not mutually

Answer 1

I'm not going to convince you to use other technologies. For all I know everyone should just stick to JSP if it works for them.

I work mainly with Spring MVC and I find JSP 2+ in combination with SiteMesh the perfect match.

SiteMesh 2/3

Provide decorators to be applied to the views mostly like inheritance works in other templating engines. Such feature is unthinkable to work without nowadays.

JSP 2+

People claiming that JSP will make it hard to avoid Java code in templates is bogus. You just shouldn't do it and with this version it's unnecessary to do so. Version 2 supports calling methods using EL which is a big advantage compared to previous versions.

With JSTL tags your code will still look like HTML so it's less awkward. Spring packs a lot of support for JSP through taglibs which is very powerful.

The taglibs are also easy to extend so customizing your own environment is a breeze.