Show HN: Blueprint: Fast, Nunjucks-like templating engine for Java 8 and beyond
I love the simplicity, expressibility and extendibility of Nunjucks.
But I was not able to find something with similar for Java, especially with the same syntax.
So, built one. And it's pretty fast too.
If you're interested in Java template engines for the client side (SPAs), you can look at Flavour: https://flavour.sourceforge.io/
While templates are a big part of Flavour, it also includes routing, components, and idiomatic invocation of Java services.
The book on Flavour is here: https://frequal.com/Flavour/book.html
Example 5-letter word game single-page app made with 100% Java, 100% Flavour: https://frequal.com/wordii/
Also, for SPA with SSR take a look at Double View https://github.com/emeraldpay/double-view
It's a React renderer that works on Java backend by using GraalVM, and then the same JS template continues to work in browser.
Interesting. I have used free marker. Pretty happy with it in general. But inability to mutate collections is an annoyance.
I will checkout blueprint. A zero dependency library is always a bonus. I don’t see any mention of thread safety in the docs for the engine though.
Hey, Blueprint rendering was already thread-safe. Only the function/filter registrations, IF done during rendering phase, was not thread-safe.
I have just pushed small update to make even these thread-safe now. Entire library is now fully thread-safe.
Updated README as well.
Thanks for pointing this out.
Looks interesting. For me I settled on JTE as the go-to template engine for Java. For anyone curious: https://jte.gg @freakynit - have you seen this one before? how's it compares with Blueprint?
Powerful. But I absolutely adore nunjucks syntax and how easy it is to extend it. Hence, I built Blueprint to give me that same feel in Java.
I have used this btw, professionally :)
Good to know.
Normally I'd use Spring Boot and get the batteries-included experience if I ever were to make web with Java.
But I could totally imagine needing a pure, well-made, zero-deps template engine for custom jobs.
I certainly have similar libraries in my bookmarks for other languages, like Haskell [1] and Rust [2].
Isn't Pebble Templates similar to this?
https://pebbletemplates.io/
Ahh... this is very very similar. I don't know why it didn't show up in Google search. Thanks for mentioning this.
We never hear about Java on this forum. That makes a post like this peculiarly interesting
Syntax looks very much like Liquid. I feel like that syntax is becoming a standard.
afaik django or jinja invented this syntax? then we saw handlebars, which is where liquid got its influence.