Why on earth isn’t there a template language that produces valid XML and can deal with all the fun little scripting language features we’ve come to know and love? In short, why isn’t there a language that looks and acts like JSP and JSTL?
I’m close to starting a new project to tackle this. Getting the FreeMarker guys to support Maps with non-String keys is hard enough. Asking them to change the syntax so that it plays nice with IDEA could be even tougher 
I looked at all the options listed here and none of them address this. Is this some crazy idea?
PS: To be fair to them, the FreeMarker developers, like the rest of us, only have 24 hours in a day and haven’t had as much time as they wish they could to focus on FreeMarker. So, anyone want to help them out?
on Nov 20th, 2005 at 5:16 pm
May I know the reson behind for not starting such a scripting language?
on Nov 20th, 2005 at 5:20 pm
why not start one.
I am +1 for that.
on Nov 22nd, 2005 at 9:17 am
Not sure if this is what you mean, but I’ve had a lot of fun with Javascript Templates – http://www.trimpath.com/project/wiki/JavaScriptTemplates
When executed on the server side via Rhino, you can do some very cool things like powerful XML processing with E4X - http://www.w3schools.com/e4x/default.asp
In fact, I’ve found it a more better solution for XML transformations than XSLT in many cases. Of course, if you use JST with web applications, you have the added benefit of being able to use the same template language on the client side.
on Nov 24th, 2005 at 5:34 pm
why not start one?
on Nov 26th, 2005 at 6:41 am
Maybe something like facelets is good.
http://facelets.dev.java.net
on Dec 17th, 2005 at 12:04 am
what about good ol Jelly. Why does it get such a bad wrap. I always liked it myself.