FreeMarker is a template engine and language which we are using in the content management system of our new application. For next week I have been preparing training material for web-developers and something I was missing, was a simple way for them to learn and try out FreeMarker. The best way to learn is by playing and experiencing something yourself, so I created a simple java application with an editor and FreeMarker renderer.
At the same time this has been a good exercise for me as well, as this is my first Swing and Java™ Web Start application. After I received some feedback, added a few more features and cleaned-up the code, I will probably release it as open source project. I think this is a handy little application for those who want to create FreeMarker templates. If you want to try it out, just click on the button below. You should have Java 1.5 or higher installed.
Pretty cewl; would be nice if you could create your own lists of data, but for a first release pretty good.
Nice one!
FreeMarker rocks!
I started working on 0.2 and as another first time, I am using Netbeans 6.0 instead of Eclipse. It is looking promising but doesn’t really run fast enough on my old PowerBook. So I will probably be waiting for my new Mac Book Pro, which should arrive by the end of this month.
Features/improvement planned:
- open/save functions
- syntax highlighting
- nicer looking GUI
- external XML feed support
- error pane instead of inline errors
Hi Harald
This is a very nice tool.
For my end of the year project, I need a freemarker editor under Flex (Adobe RIA). Did you intend to develop a version with Adobe Technology ? If no, would you be so kind as to send me your code so that I can transfer it from Java to Flex ? It would help me a lot.
Thanks in advance
Best regards
Alex
Harald,
It looks good but let me make a suggestion that will turn this from a utility for a course into a decent IDE.
Make some provision for editing the data models. Even better let me save a “data set” and reload them at will. This way I can develop my templates against a collection of data models without having to build a whole Java framework for it.
This is useful precisely in those situations where freemarker is useful. You have a dedicated Java developer working with a dedicated web developer.
Wonderful. Please share the source code of this. I think what you have is wonderful teaching tool and I would love to read the code you have for the real time updates.
Jeffery, there is a new website, which offers a similar functionality: http://www.freemarkertool.com
I downloaded the required jars and ran it as java app. It works. It would have been good if it can be repackaged for support in current java webstar release! Nevertheless, it helped me – Thanks Harald.
When I saw freemarkertook.com I basically lost interest in this project. Unfortunately freemarkertool.com is no longer available. I’ll see if I can find time to re-activate the Sketchbook project or otherwise create and host something like freemarkertool.com.