FreeMarker VS Thymeleaf

FreeMarker is a template engine, it allows to generate text output based on templates and dynamic data. It is similar to Mustache, Handlebars, Thymeleaf and other template engines. Templates are written in the FreeMarker Template Language (FTL) that supports conditional blocks, iterations, formatting, and many other capabilities.

Getting back to our two main technologies....we have implemented Keycloak as our Identification and Authorization Management system (IAM). However, as these things go, Keycloak has its own tech stack. One of the technologies, of course, is the language they used, which is Java. And being it is Java, they chose to use a templating engine called Freemarker.

The project I was working on was a website using Magnolia as their CMS. It uses the Freemarker templating engine under the hood. Essentially these are super-powered HTML files, which give you access to the CMS content. You can still use all of the HTML tags you want, including the

You can use Java for Backend and Frontend. A relative new kid on the block for Frontend is Qute. The general keyword you are searching for is Java Templating Engine. Specific examples would be Thymeleaf or FreeMarker. There are some framework, which offer a lot more than templating like Vaadin or Wicket. Some are just specifications like Jakarta Faces with some of their implementations MyFaces or Mojarra.

Keycloak uses FreeMaker to store and render templates. Read more about how Keycloak manages its themes in the official documentation.

For some component types, there is also the possibility to use a Freemarker template instead for more complex UI components. In this case, it will look like this:

From sing-up page to admin portal, you can customize pretty much any part of the UI using custom themes. Themes are developed using Freemarker Templates and it's all documented here.

Thymeleaf is used for serving frontend resources in this service, and it has cache enabled for static resources based on content. Something like the following properties:

xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org"> th:text="${title}">Product List th:each="product : ${products}" th:text="${product.name}">

*with Thymeleaf and SpringSecurity 6 to build a regular web application and it uses Authgear to **add authentication with the login page

Finally, we will create a HomeController to make the test effect more visually significant by controlling the content displayed on the page. We will display different information according to the role and use the thymeleaf template engine to render.

Finally, we create the Controller class and use the thymeleaf template engine to build the home page information. Different permission information sees different results in the home page list.

Configure all requests here to require authentication and authorization, provide Form form authentication methods, and customize the login template through thymeleaf. The code here is not within the scope of this article, and the following will not Show specific details.

Then let's define the html page, here we use the thymeleaf template engine:

You can also use SSR (Server Sided Rendering) to generate the front end before it is returned, reducing the need for JS. Thymeleaf is an example of that.

You can use Java for Backend and Frontend. A relative new kid on the block for Frontend is Qute. The general keyword you are searching for is Java Templating Engine. Specific examples would be Thymeleaf or FreeMarker. There are some framework, which offer a lot more than templating like Vaadin or Wicket. Some are just specifications like Jakarta Faces with some of their implementations MyFaces or Mojarra.