Can anyone point me to Spring MVC, Tiles, Freemarker integration example?

Question

In my Spring MVC based applications i use Freemarker and i like it very much, but it's lacking advantages provided by Composite View pattern.

I'm thinking of trying to use Tiles2 together with Freemarker - does anyone know where do i find a simple example of SpringMVC together with Tiles2+Freemarker?

Answer 1

nevermind, i've solved it. i just had to specify freemarker templates in tiles definitions file

<definition name="template" template="/WEB-INF/ftl/main.ftl">

and add freemarker servlet/maping to web.xml

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>freemarker</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>freemarker.ext.servlet.FreemarkerServlet</servlet-class>

    <!-- FreemarkerServlet settings: -->
    <init-param>
        <param-name>TemplatePath</param-name>
        <param-value>/</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>NoCache</param-name>
        <param-value>true</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>ContentType</param-name>
        <param-value>text/html</param-value>
    </init-param>

    <!-- FreeMarker settings: -->
    <init-param>
        <param-name>template_update_delay</param-name>
        <param-value>0</param-value> <!-- 0 is for development only! Use higher value otherwise. -->
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>default_encoding</param-name>
        <param-value>ISO-8859-1</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>number_format</param-name>
        <param-value>0.##########</param-value>
    </init-param>

    <load-on-startup>5</load-on-startup>
</servlet>  

 <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>freemarker</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.ftl</url-pattern>
 </servlet-mapping>

in spring configuration specify tiles as my primary view engine

<bean id="tilesConfigurer" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.TilesConfigurer">
     <property name="definitions">
      <list>
       <value>/WEB-INF/defs/definitions.xml</value>
      </list>
     </property>
</bean>
<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.UrlBasedViewResolver">
     <property name="viewClass" value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.TilesView"/>
</bean>

Answer 2

Another product you could use instead of Tiles is SiteMesh, which I've used in some apps. It's worth checking out.