FreeMarker Tutorials

This is a collection of tutorials to help you get started with FreeMarker web development.

Target audience

These tutorials are aimed at frontend and backend engineers who are familiar with some programming concepts and have a basic understanding of what MVC is. Even if you have never worked on an MVC project before, these tutorials should be enough to get you started.

FreeMarker is a Java templating engine and can be used as a view resolver with the popular Spring MVC framework. FreeMarker is as an alternative to other view resolvers like JSP, XSL, or Velocity and is an actively maintained, open-source project.

Tutorials

1. Installing Java and Maven
   You can skip this if you already have Java 7+ and Maven 3.1+ installed.

2. Running a server locally
   You can skip this if you are already comfortable starting up and configuring a server like Tomcat, but other tutorials will reference the settings in this tutorial.

3. FreeMarker “Hello World”
   A basic overview of starting up and configuring a FreeMarker webapp with Spring MVC. Topics include:

   • Java-based Spring configuration
   • Configuring FreeMarker settings
   • Ensuring your app has proper UTF-8 charset configuration
   • Deploying to different contexts using Tomcat