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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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