Show HN: Blueprint: Fast, Nunjucks-like templating engine for Java 8 and beyond

I love the simplicity, expressibility and extendibility of Nunjucks.

But I was not able to find something with similar for Java, especially with the same syntax.

So, built one. And it's pretty fast too.

https://github.com/freakynit/Blueprint

21 points

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freakynit

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6 days ago

12 comments

TeaVMFan ・ 6 days ago

If you're interested in Java template engines for the client side (SPAs), you can look at Flavour: https://flavour.sourceforge.io/

While templates are a big part of Flavour, it also includes routing, components, and idiomatic invocation of Java services.

The book on Flavour is here: https://frequal.com/Flavour/book.html

Example 5-letter word game single-page app made with 100% Java, 100% Flavour: https://frequal.com/wordii/

  • splix ・ 6 days ago

    Also, for SPA with SSR take a look at Double View https://github.com/emeraldpay/double-view

    It's a React renderer that works on Java backend by using GraalVM, and then the same JS template continues to work in browser.

susika ・ 6 days ago

Looks interesting. For me I settled on JTE as the go-to template engine for Java. For anyone curious: https://jte.gg @freakynit - have you seen this one before? how's it compares with Blueprint?

  • freakynit ・ 5 days ago

    Powerful. But I absolutely adore nunjucks syntax and how easy it is to extend it. Hence, I built Blueprint to give me that same feel in Java.

    I have used this btw, professionally :)

sshine ・ 6 days ago

Good to know.

Normally I'd use Spring Boot and get the batteries-included experience if I ever were to make web with Java.

But I could totally imagine needing a pure, well-made, zero-deps template engine for custom jobs.

I certainly have similar libraries in my bookmarks for other languages, like Haskell [1] and Rust [2].

  [1]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/heterocephalus
  [2]: https://crates.io/crates/minijinja
ekspreso ・ 6 days ago

Isn't Pebble Templates similar to this?

https://pebbletemplates.io/

  • freakynit ・ 5 days ago

    Ahh... this is very very similar. I don't know why it didn't show up in Google search. Thanks for mentioning this.

redditor98654 ・ 5 days ago

Interesting. I have used free marker. Pretty happy with it in general. But inability to mutate collections is an annoyance.

I will checkout blueprint. A zero dependency library is always a bonus. I don’t see any mention of thread safety in the docs for the engine though.

  • freakynit ・ 5 days ago

    Hey, Blueprint rendering was already thread-safe. Only the function/filter registrations, IF done during rendering phase, was not thread-safe.

    I have just pushed small update to make even these thread-safe now. Entire library is now fully thread-safe.

    Updated README as well.

    Thanks for pointing this out.

nashashmi ・ 6 days ago

We never hear about Java on this forum. That makes a post like this peculiarly interesting

deanebarker ・ 6 days ago

Syntax looks very much like Liquid. I feel like that syntax is becoming a standard.

  • whalesalad ・ 6 days ago

    afaik django or jinja invented this syntax? then we saw handlebars, which is where liquid got its influence.