Simple is the keyword

Cambridge is a template engine for the java platform which can be used with your web framework of choice. It currently supports servlets, JAX-RS, Play Framework. (Spring MVC and Struts 2.0 support is in development.)

Pure markup syntax, performance, extensibility and simplicity are the key features of Cambridge. Designed by web developers for web developers to make your life easier.

Show me the code

<div id="loginBox" a:if="!loggedIn">
   Username: <input type="text" name="username"/>
   Password: <input type="password" name="password"/>
   <input type="button" onclick="login();" value="Sign in"/>
</div>
<div a:else>
   <div>Hello ${user.name}!</div>
   <div>Here are your online friends:</div>

   <ul>
      <li a:foreach="user.onlineFriends" a:as="friend">${friend.name}</li>
   </ul>
</div>

If you're wondering what the html code above is doing, here is what it tells Cambridge to do. Lets start with the a:if attribute in the first line. It basically says, the div #loginBox should only be rendered if the loggedIn property in our data model is false. That is how you would do if blocks in Cambridge. It uses the scope of your html tag for defining where the if logic should be applied. The next tag which immediatelly follows the div with id #loginBox has another attribute named a:else which says this div should be rendered if the condition in the first tag was not met.

If you look at the ${user.name} syntax, that is how you write expressions in Cambridge. In this case it is printing the name property of a User object.

Finally if the user is already logged in, we want to display online friends of the current user as a bunch of <li> elements. You don't need to wrap the <li> tags with some looping code in cambridge. All you need to do is to define an a:foreach attribute which will iterate over the onlineFriends property of the user object and render a separate <li> for every online friend of user.

The attributes like a:if, a:foreach are called Behaviors in Cambridge. You can attach behaviors to your markup tags by adding these attributes which themselves will not be displayed in the rendered output.

Overview of features

Pure markup syntax

You don't need to pollute your html/xml template file with any server side code, tons of external tags or scripts. Everything can be achieved by just adding custom attributes to your existing tags.

Template inheritance

Cambridge template files can extend other template files and override certain parts of the parent template. This makes maintaining your templates much easier with project wide skeleton templates that you can re-use.

Extensibility

Cambridge is designed from ground up with modularity and extensibility in mind. The internal API which is used to build all the built-in behaviors, functions, filters and custom tags is very available to anyone using Cambridge so you can easily add new features to Cambrige. Cambridge also allows you to plug-in your expression language of choice such as MVEL, OGNL or JEXL if you want more features then what the built-in expression language provides.

Performance

Cambridge is optimized for web-scale. Our benchmarks show that Cambridge outperforms its alternatives like Freemarker, Velocity and Play Framework. Once parsed, Cambridge templates get converted to highly efficient reusable/immutable objects.

Rich web framework support

Cambridge comes with out of the box support for many of the MVC style popular web frameworks.

Java API to manipulate your templates

With Cambridge, you can start with 100% pure html templates without any custom tags or attributes and attach dynamic behavior to them by just using a Java API.

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