What is sitemesh

I have seen Sitemesh used with开发者_JS百科 Spring and Freemarker(FTL). So I want to know what is Sitemesh and its use with FTL, with example.

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@see: http://www.opensymphony.com/sitemesh/

What Is It?

• SiteMesh is a web-page layout and decoration framework and web- application integration framework to aid in creating large sites consisting of many pages for which a consistent look/feel, navigation and layout scheme is required.

• SiteMesh intercepts requests to any static or dynamically generated HTML page requested through the web-server, parses the page, obtains properties and data from the content and generates an appropriate final page with modifications to the original. This is based upon the well-known GangOfFour Decorator design pattern.

• SiteMesh can also include entire HTML pages as a Panel within another page. This is similar to a Server-Side Include, except that the HTML document will be modified to create a visual window (using the document's Meta-data as an aid) within a page. Using this feature, Portal type web sites can be built very quickly and effectively. This is based upon the well-known GangOfFour Composite design pattern.

• SiteMesh is built using Java 2 with Servlet, JSP and XML technologies. This makes it ideal for use with J2EE applications, however it can be integrated with server-side web architectures that are not Java based such as CGI (Perl/Python/C/C++/etc), PHP, ColdFusion, etc...

• SiteMesh is very extensible and is designed in a way in which it is easy to extend for custom needs.

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sitemesh is a web page layout framework.

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OpenSymphony doesn't seem to be around anymore, so the best documentation for Sitemesh I've seen is available through their Wiki and as the Readme on their Github repository.

I would caution that if you're interested in using Sitemesh, or at least understanding its structure in a project, Sitemesh2 and Sitemesh3 have significant differences in their structure and implementation, though they work conceptually the same way.