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FreeMarker is a template Java template language that is a great alternative to JSP. FreeMarker is ideal for situations where your action results can possibly be loaded from outside a Servlet container. For example, if you wished to support plugins in your application, you might wish to use FreeMarker so that the plugins could provide the entire action class and view in a single jar that is loaded from the classloader.

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This ordering makes it ideal for providing templates inside a fully-built jar, but allowing for overrides of those templates to be defined in your web application. In fact, this is how you can override the default UI tags and Form Tags included with the framework.

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FreeMarker includes complete tag support. See the FreeMarker Tags documentation for information on how to use the generic Struts Tags provided by Struts. In addition to this, you can use any JSP tag, like so:

<#assign mytag=JspTaglibs[WW:"/WEB-INF/mytag.tld"]>
<@mytag.tagx attribute1="some ${value}"/>

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If you want the framework to handle the formatting according to the Type Conversion you have specified, you shouldn't use the normal ${...} syntax. Instead, you should use the property tag. The difference is that the property tag is specifically designed to take an OGNL expression, evaluate it, and then convert it to a String using any Type Conversion rules you have specified. The normal ${...} syntax will use a FreeMarker expression language, evaluate it, and then convert it to a String using the built in formatting rules.

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