Java Servlet Programming, 2nd Edition

Chapter 15. WebMacro

In the same family as Tea, but following a more servlet-driven approach, is a development framework named WebMacro, available from http://www.webmacro.org. WebMacro was created by Justin Wells at Semiotek as part of the company’s site creation contract service and released as open source to improve the tool and increase the company’s exposure. There are talks of merging WebMacro into the Apache Jakarta Project at http://jakarta.apache.org to gain wider community-based development. Currently there’s a clone of WebMacro named Velocity being developed within Jakarta.

WebMacro is commonly referred to as a template engine , the generic name for systems that perform text replacement operations inside web page templates. There are other open source template engines available, most notably FreeMarker (http://freemarker.sourceforge.net); however, we look at WebMacro here because at the time of this writing it has the largest mindshare, has been used on large commercial sites such as AltaVista, has been integrated in open source frameworks such as Turbine (http://java.apache.org/turbine) and Melati (http://www.melati.org), and has been used as a base for prominent open source projects such as JetSpeed (http://java.apache.org/jetspeed). Like Tea, WebMacro is licensed under an Apache-style license so it can be used in conjunction with commercial applications without any problem.

This section covers WebMacro 0.94, a prerelease snapshot from October 2000. Things are subject ...