Onto Better Templating

There have been many efforts to provide an alternative to JSP: Velocity and all. JSTP is another new one. They reuse JSP syntax (which is not the best syntax to follow) and decouple templating from servlet, which is a good thing. In the Cornerstone Framework, we use a tiny subset of JSP in our MVC module. With Cornerstone Template, we also try to provide an alternative to JSP that achieves the following goals:

• Templating decoupled from servlet, so that templates can be used outside the context of servlets, for example, when you produce an email to send from a template.
• Zero coding in templates, so that templates can be done by web designers without expertise of programming
• Support of a simple and yet powerful expression language (we support OGNL)
• Support of template nesting, so that complex templates can be built on top of simple ones