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.

@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.

sitemesh is a web page layout framework.

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.