FreeMarker is another Open Source project. It is a template engine which has some programming capabilities. For those who are familiar with Velocity (another templating engine), the migration to FreeMarker is easy, as they share many of the same concepts. OFBiz makes great use of FreeMarker's flexibility to display data that has been returned from event and services or lookups performed in the screen widgets actions in different formats, usually XHTML. The separation of the presentation into these FreeMarker templates allows web designers to concentrate solely on the design and layout and keeps their need to know any other programming languages to a minimum. Freemarker Template Language is commonly referred to as FTL, and FreeMarker templates have the file extension .ftl
.
Throughout the course of this book, we have used some FreeMarker templates already. The messages.ftl
file that has been used in so many of the examples is a very good example of such a file. Let's remind...