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| </a></div></div><div class="header-bottom-bg"><div class="site-width search-row"><a href="index.html" class="navigation-header">FreeMarker Manual</a><div class="navigation-header"></div></div><div class="site-width breadcrumb-row"><ul class="breadcrumb" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/BreadcrumbList"><li class="step-0" itemprop="itemListElement" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ListItem"><a class="label" itemprop="item" href="index.html"><span itemprop="name">FreeMarker Manual</span></a></li><li class="step-1" itemprop="itemListElement" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ListItem"><a class="label" itemprop="item" href="xgui.html"><span itemprop="name">XML Processing Guide</span></a></li><li class="step-2" itemprop="itemListElement" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ListItem"><a class="label" itemprop="item" href="xgui_preface.html"><span itemprop="name">Preface</span></a></li></ul><div class="bookmarks" title="Bookmarks"><span class="sr-only">Bookmarks:</span><ul class="bookmark-list"><li><a href="alphaidx.html">Index</a></li><li><a href="gloss.html">Glossary</a></li><li><a href="ref.html">Reference</a></li><li><a href="app_faq.html">FAQ</a></li><li><a href="preface.html#test_target">Bőregér</a></li></ul></div></div></div> <div class="main-content site-width"> |
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| <h1 class="content-header header-chapter" id="xgui_preface" itemprop="headline">Preface</h1> |
| </div></div><p>Although FreeMarker was originally designed as a web page template |
| engine, as of version 2.3 it also targets another application domain: |
| transforming XML into arbitrary textual output (e.g. HTML files). Thus, |
| in many cases, FreeMarker is an XSLT alternative.</p><p>Technically, there is nothing special in transforming XML |
| documents. It's just like when you do anything else with FreeMarker: you |
| drop the XML document into the data-model (and possibly other |
| variables), and then you merge the data-model with the FTL template(s) |
| that generate the output text. The extra features introduced for better |
| XML processing are the node FTL variable type (symbolizes a node in |
| generic tree structures, usable not only for XML) and the built-ins and |
| directives dealing with them, and the XML wrapper you get out-of-the-box |
| that exposes XML documents as FTL variables for the templates.</p><p>What's the difference between using FreeMarker or XSLT? The FTL |
| language has the usual imperative/procedural logic. On the other hand, |
| XSLT is a language with declarative style, designed by "too clever" |
| people, so it's not easy to adopt its logic, nor to use it in many |
| cases. Also its syntax is terribly verbose. However, XSLT's |
| "apply-templates" method can be very handy when you process XML |
| documents, thus FreeMarker supports something similar called the |
| ``visitor pattern''. So in many applications, it is much easier to write |
| FTL stylesheets than XSLT style-sheets. Another fundamental difference |
| is that FTL "transforms" the node tree to text, while XSLT transforms |
| the tree to another tree. So you cannot always use FreeMarker where you |
| can use XSLT.</p><div class="bottom-pagers-wrapper"><div class="pagers bottom"><a class="paging-arrow previous" href="xgui.html"><span>Previous</span></a><a class="paging-arrow next" href="xgui_expose.html"><span>Next</span></a></div></div></div></div> </div> |
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