GvTags - The Web is getting Groovy

GvTags is a lightweight yet powerful tag library and template engine for the new dynamic programming language Groovy.

The GvTags tag library can be used to generate web pages with powerful tag support. This tag library can be used with the template servlet of GvTags (TagTemplateServlet) or with JavaServer Pages (JSP). GvTags might be for the Groovy programming language what the combination of JSTL and Struts is for Java.

The GvTags template engine (TagTemplateEngine) is a template engine for groovy with support for custom tags. It can be used to generate any kind of text documents (ASCII or Unicode). Since it is written in Groovy and compiled to a Java class file, it can be used from Groovy, from Java, as an ant task or from the command line. If the template engine is applied to Groovy, if allows some nice Groovy meta programming.

New: All-in-one Release which includes everything to run GvTags and write web applications in Groovy.

With GvTags you get the best from several worlds:

Flexibility and agility from scripting languages
Powerful expression syntax from scripting languages
Clear XML based tag syntax
Same lanugage for expressions in tags and in application classes
MVC pattern with optional controller servlet
Fast execution through dynamical compilation and optimized execution in a JVM
Access to Java libraries and Java technology since Groovy integrates well into Java
Based on the current Groovy Release 1.5

GvTags is being developed unter the [Apache License 2.0]. Basicly this means, the GvTags library can freely be used in any project - even in non-free projects.

: There's a whole universe out there, beyond Java.

: Beyond Java, Bruce Tate (2005)

Status / Download

Project status: beta (February 2008)

Current release: 0.3.1 February 18, 2008

Update to Groovy 1.5
Update to Jetty 6.1 as the embedded web server
Page directive for character encoding and content type
More performance improvements
Ant task for template engine
Improve check for tag attributes
Example for the dynamic execution of Groovy code
Use of Apache commons logging with log4j instead of JDK logging

Download

You can download an all-in-one Release, a Source Release or War Release from [Berlios] or from [Sourceforge].

Planned for upcoming releases:

Make it possible to define custom tags in GTL
Include a JSON serializer and deserializer
Update to groovy 1.5.6

Compatibility with groovy 1.6 beta
Replace all log.trace logging with log.debug since log4j doesn't support trace level
Update 3rd party libs: ant 1.7.0
Include OpenJPA and Derby
Example how to use annotations with JPA
Command line option to activate a AJP13 connector for mod_jk
Add version of GvTags to context as an attribute
Tag to support java resource bundles
Create an empty application in the All-in-one Release which can serve as an starting point for a new application
Use groovydoc to create documentation for gvtags
Display offending code on error page.
Cleaning up of the CodeSnippetCache and the ScriptEngine
Refactoring of the directory structure
Minimize Java code
More performance improvements
Parameters for forward
Unification of TagContext for GvTags in JSP in GTL
Unit tests for examples
AJAX tags for dojo
HTML tags

More things to come, see Release plan, it also contains the release history since 2004.

The GvTags project tries to release a new version about every month. To get informed about new releases join the [mailing list].

Documentation

Here is the Documentation of GvTags!

Help Welcome

[Here] is an index of all wiki pages.

This web page has been created by a [UseMod] Wiki. The project is hosted by [Berlios], here is the [project page of GvTags at Berlios]. Also it's cohosted by [sourceforge.net], here is the [project page of GvTags at sourceforge].

Contact GvTags