StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Languages
  4. Java Tools
  5. Apache FreeMarker vs JSF

Apache FreeMarker vs JSF

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Apache FreeMarker
Apache FreeMarker
Stacks508
Followers74
Votes0
GitHub Stars1.1K
Forks270
JSF
JSF
Stacks138
Followers223
Votes4

Apache FreeMarker vs JSF: What are the differences?

  1. Template Engine: Apache FreeMarker is a template engine that focuses on generating text output (HTML web pages, emails, etc.) based on templates written in FreeMarker Template Language (FTL), whereas JSF stands for JavaServer Faces, which is a Java web application framework that simplifies building user interfaces by providing reusable UI components.

  2. Language Support: FreeMarker uses its own templating language (FTL) which is easy to learn and use but is specifically tailored for templating purposes. On the other hand, JSF is a framework that primarily uses Java as the programming language for developing web applications.

  3. Integration with Libraries: FreeMarker can be easily integrated with other Java frameworks and libraries, making it versatile for use in various development environments. JSF, being a Java framework itself, integrates well with other Java technologies like JPA, JTA, CDI, etc., providing a seamless development experience.

  4. Maturity and Community Support: FreeMarker has been around for a longer time and has a well-established community that provides support and updates. JSF, being a part of the Java EE platform, also has a strong community and is actively maintained by Oracle.

  5. Scalability: Apache FreeMarker is more lightweight and suitable for small to medium-sized projects where rapid development is needed. On the contrary, JSF is more enterprise-oriented and provides features like managed beans, resource handling, and component libraries that make it more suitable for large-scale applications.

  6. Templating vs Component-Based Approach: FreeMarker follows a templating approach where the focus is on the layout and design of the output, whereas JSF follows a component-based approach where predefined UI components are used to build the interface, making it easier to maintain consistency across the application.

In Summary, Apache FreeMarker and JSF differ in their approach to templating, language support, integration capabilities, community support, scalability, and development methodologies.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Apache FreeMarker
Apache FreeMarker
JSF
JSF

It is a "template engine"; a generic tool to generate text output (anything from HTML to auto generated source code) based on templates. It's a Java package, a class library for Java programmers.

It is used for building component-based user interfaces for web applications and was formalized as a standard through the Java Community

Powerful template language;Multipurpose and lightweight;Internationalization/localization-aware;XML processing capabilities;Versatile data-model
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
1.1K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
270
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
508
Stacks
138
Followers
74
Followers
223
Votes
0
Votes
4
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 2
    Rich and comprehensive Request Life-cycle
  • 1
    Server Side component
  • 1
    Very Mature UI framework
Integrations
Java
Java
Vim
Vim
IntelliJ IDEA
IntelliJ IDEA
Eclipse
Eclipse
NetBeans IDE
NetBeans IDE
TextMate
TextMate
Emacs
Emacs
Java
Java
Java EE
Java EE

What are some alternatives to Apache FreeMarker, JSF?

AngularJS

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

Vue.js

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

Ember.js

Ember.js

A JavaScript framework that does all of the heavy lifting that you'd normally have to do by hand. There are tasks that are common to every web app; It does those things for you, so you can focus on building killer features and UI.

Backbone.js

Backbone.js

Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

Angular

Angular

It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.

Aurelia

Aurelia

Aurelia is a next generation JavaScript client framework that leverages simple conventions to empower your creativity.

Mithril

Mithril

Mithril is around 12kb gzipped thanks to its small, focused, API. It provides a templating engine with a virtual DOM diff implementation for performant rendering, utilities for high-level modelling via functional composition, as well as support for routing and componentization.

Quarkus

Quarkus

It tailors your application for GraalVM and HotSpot. Amazingly fast boot time, incredibly low RSS memory (not just heap size!) offering near instant scale up and high density memory utilization in container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. We use a technique we call compile time boot.

Marionette

Marionette

It is a JavaScript library with a RESTful JSON interface and is based on the Model–view–presenter application design paradigm. Backbone is known for being lightweight, as its only hard dependency is on one JavaScript library, Underscore.js, plus jQuery for use of the full library.

Ampersand.js

Ampersand.js

We <3 Backbone.js at &yet. It’s brilliantly simple and solves many common problems in developing clientside applications. But we missed the focused simplicity of tiny modules in node-land. We wanted something similar in style and philosophy, but that fully embraced tiny modules, npm, and browserify. Ampersand.js is a well-defined approach to combining (get it?) a series of intentionally tiny modules.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase