Jakarta Velocity Tools is a newly released project from the Apache Software Foundation. It provides servlets and tools for rapid, clean, MVC web development with Velocity, tools for using Velocity with the Struts framework, and a set of generic tools to help with any Velocity project.

If you are interested in a quick, clean, easy, and very-MVC friendly alternative to web development with JSP, you should give Velocity Tools a look.

The centerpiece of the Velocity Tools project is the VelocityView package. Therein you will find excellent support for rapid development of web applications with the Velocity template language (VTL). VTL is easy to learn, and now, thanks to the Velocity Tools project, Velocity is even easier to setup and use in your web applications. The project provides support for automatic population of the Velocity context via an xml-configured toolbox for rapid Pull-MVC development.

Also included in the Velocity Tools project are tools and examples for using Velocity as a view layer with the Struts framework. Velocity templates can be used entirely in place of or right alongside your JSPs. This is easily the most popular reason for using Velocity Tools and has long been a motivation behind its development. Even Struts committer and "Struts in Action" author Ted Husted has admitted to shifting to development with VelocityStruts in place of JSP-Struts.

If you are a web application developer using Struts, other frameworks, or no framework at all, Velocity Tools is definitely worth a look!

Checkouot the new Jakarta Velocity Tools

...and I like it as a template language. The question is, whether webpage development heads in this direction. From what I can see from JSF, BEA, Oracle, Microsoft and of course our own little framework, it looks more like we are moving finally towards a component based approach for dynamic web page generation and I think it has been about time to do so.

yes, i too see this trend. and actually, in a sense, this is one of the next steps for Velocity Tools too. we've long had plans to create a repository of Velocimacros (components) to assist developers. now that 1.0 is out, i intend to get started on that. however, i do not presently envision such a library being or even trying to be the equivalent of JSF. though i know only a little of JSF and the like, it may be that we will be writing tools and support for integration with it at some point. we'll see what happens when it happens.

Any IDE integration around?

There is this - http://veloedit.sourceforge.net/

i don't generally use an IDE for templates, but there is an Eclipse plugin for Velocity: http://sourceforge.net/projects/veloedit/

also, i'm told there are a number of tools out there to assist in managing/configuring Struts, though i've never used those either. :)

The eclipse plugin is nice. You get some code completion, you get syntax highlighting (which helps visually organize things), and you also get a bracket down the side bar that shows you the beginning and end of any statement block you're in or click on.

How is this going to affect WebMacro? I know they compete and are very similar.