In this post, we will be discussing how to create and use templates with Thymeleaf.
Thymeleaf is a modern server-side Java template engine that enables us to create HTML, XML, and other markup languages in a well-formed and structured way.
It is an open-source project that is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
A template is a file that contains the static parts of your website or application, as well as placeholder variables for dynamic content.
A template engine is a tool that takes your static template files and replaces the placeholder variables with actual values, resulting in a file that can be served to a user.
Templates are a great way to separate the static parts of your website or application from the dynamic parts.
This separation makes it easier to manage your code, as well as make changes to the static parts of your site without affecting the dynamic content.
It also makes it easier to cache the static parts of your site, which can improve performance.
Thymeleaf is a template engine for Java.
It is an open-source project that is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
Thymeleaf enables us to create HTML, XML, and other markup languages in a well-formed and structured way.
It also has excellent support for internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n).
Thymeleaf is used in many popular Java web frameworks, such as Spring MVC, Spring Boot, and Vaadin.
Thymeleaf has two types of syntax: Standard and OGNL.
Standard syntax is the default syntax mode and is used to create well-formed and structured HTML, XML, and other markup languages.
OGNL syntax is an extension of the standard syntax and is used to access objects in the Thymeleaf context.
We can create a Thymeleaf template in any text editor.
For this example, we will create a template called "hello.html" in the src/main/resources/templates directory.
hello.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org">
<head>
<title>Hello, World!</title>
</head>
<body>
<p th:text="${message}">Hello, World!</p>
</body>
</html>
In the template above, we have a variable called "message" that will be replaced with a value when the template is processed.
We can render a Thymeleaf template in a Java application using the ThymeleafTemplateEngine class.
First, we need to create a ThymeleafTemplateEngine instance:
ThymeleafTemplateEngine templateEngine = new ThymeleafTemplateEngine();
Then, we can render the template by passing the template name and a map of variables to the renderTemplate() method:
String result = templateEngine.renderTemplate("hello.html", ImmutableMap.of("message", "Hello, World!"));
In this post, we have learned how to create and use templates with Thymeleaf.
We have also learned about the different types of syntax that Thymeleaf supports.
If you want to learn more about Thymeleaf, please check out the following resources: