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  5. JSTL vs Thymeleaf

JSTL vs Thymeleaf

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Thymeleaf
Thymeleaf
Stacks212
Followers296
Votes4
JSTL
JSTL
Stacks25
Followers24
Votes0

JSTL vs Thymeleaf: What are the differences?

Introduction

JSTL (JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library) and Thymeleaf are both popular technologies used in Java web development. While they serve similar purposes, there are several key differences between the two.

  1. Syntax: JSTL uses XML-like tags and expressions within JSP (JavaServer Pages) files, making it more similar to traditional HTML. Thymeleaf, on the other hand, uses a custom syntax with attributes and expressions embedded directly in HTML tags, resulting in more readable and natural HTML templates.

  2. Ease of Learning: Thymeleaf is generally considered easier to learn and use compared to JSTL. Its HTML-like syntax and seamless integration with HTML tags make it more intuitive for developers, especially those with front-end experience. JSTL, with its XML-like syntax, may require additional effort and familiarity with JSP to fully grasp.

  3. Server-Side vs Client-Side Rendering: JSTL operates on the server-side, where the JSP files are processed and transformed into HTML before being sent to the client's browser. Thymeleaf, on the other hand, supports both server-side and client-side rendering. This means that Thymeleaf templates can be processed on the server-side or shipped as-is to the client, where JavaScript can handle dynamic rendering.

  4. Integration with Spring Framework: Thymeleaf has seamless integration with the Spring Framework, one of the most popular Java frameworks for web development. It provides several powerful features, such as automatic form binding and Spring Expression Language (SpEL) integration. Although JSTL is also commonly used with Spring, it requires some additional configuration and may not have the same level of integration and convenience as Thymeleaf.

  5. Rich Templating Features: Thymeleaf offers a wide range of powerful templating features that enable developers to build complex HTML templates. These features include conditional rendering, iteration, internationalization support, and more. While JSTL also provides some templating capabilities, Thymeleaf's feature set is generally more extensive and flexible.

  6. Client-Side DOM Manipulation: Thymeleaf, with its support for client-side rendering, allows developers to easily manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM) of a webpage using JavaScript, resulting in dynamic and interactive UIs. In contrast, JSTL operates entirely on the server-side and does not provide direct support for client-side DOM manipulation.

In summary, Thymeleaf offers a more intuitive syntax, easier learning curve, and seamless integration with the Spring Framework. It also provides richer templating features and supports both server-side and client-side rendering. JSTL, on the other hand, uses an XML-like syntax, operates solely on the server-side, and may require more effort to learn and configure.

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Detailed Comparison

Thymeleaf
Thymeleaf
JSTL
JSTL

It is a modern server-side Java template engine for both web and standalone environments. It is aimed at creating elegant web code while adding powerful features and retaining prototyping abilities.

It has support for common, structural tasks such as iteration and conditionals, tags for manipulating XML documents, internationalization tags, and SQL tags. It also provides a framework for integrating the existing custom tags with the JSTL tags.

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tags for manipulating XML documents; internationalization tags; SQL tags
Statistics
Stacks
212
Stacks
25
Followers
296
Followers
24
Votes
4
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 4
    Its delicous
No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available
Spring Boot
Spring Boot
Java EE
Java EE

What are some alternatives to Thymeleaf, JSTL?

Quarkus

Quarkus

It tailors your application for GraalVM and HotSpot. Amazingly fast boot time, incredibly low RSS memory (not just heap size!) offering near instant scale up and high density memory utilization in container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. We use a technique we call compile time boot.

MyBatis

MyBatis

It is a first class persistence framework with support for custom SQL, stored procedures and advanced mappings. It eliminates almost all of the JDBC code and manual setting of parameters and retrieval of results. It can use simple XML or Annotations for configuration and map primitives, Map interfaces and Java POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects) to database records.

guava

guava

The Guava project contains several of Google's core libraries that we rely on in our Java-based projects: collections, caching, primitives support, concurrency libraries, common annotations, string processing, I/O, and so forth.

JSF

JSF

It is used for building component-based user interfaces for web applications and was formalized as a standard through the Java Community

JavaMelody

JavaMelody

It is used to monitor Java or Java EE application servers in QA and production environments. It is not a tool to simulate requests from users, it is a tool to measure and calculate statistics on real operation of an application depending on the usage of the application by users. It is mainly based on statistics of requests and on evolution charts.

RxJava

RxJava

A library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs by using observable sequences for the Java VM.

MapStruct

MapStruct

It is a code generator that greatly simplifies the implementation of mappings between Java bean types based on a convention over configuration approach. The generated mapping code uses plain method invocations and thus is fast, type-safe and easy to understand.

Java 8

Java 8

It is a revolutionary release of the world’s no 1 development platform. It includes a huge upgrade to the Java programming model and a coordinated evolution of the JVM, Java language, and libraries. Java 8 includes features for productivity, ease of use, improved polyglot programming, security and improved performance.

Apache FreeMarker

Apache FreeMarker

It is a "template engine"; a generic tool to generate text output (anything from HTML to auto generated source code) based on templates. It's a Java package, a class library for Java programmers.

Jackson

Jackson

It is a suite of data-processing tools for Java (and the JVM platform), including the flagship streaming JSON parser / generator library, matching data-binding library (POJOs to and from JSON) and additional data format modules to process data encoded in Avro, BSON, CBOR, CSV, Smile, (Java) Properties, Protobuf, XML or YAML; and even the large set of data format modules to support data types of widely used data types such as Guava, Joda.

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