FreeMarker 2.3.11 released

We're pleased to announce that FreeMarker 2.3.11 is now released. This release contains several important bugfixes, performance improvements (both speed and memory), as well as some major feature improvements. It is almost completely backwards compatible with any other 2.3.x version and as such can be used as a drop-in replacement for them. (The only non-backwards compatible change is that ?c built-in formats numbers differently than it did earlier, but that is actually a bug fix).

Download it from SourceForge

You can look at the full list of changes, but I'll summarize it here by topic:

New features

• We now have much better JSP 2.0 and JSP 2.1 compliance. Most notably, JSP tags implementing SimpleTag interface will now work.


• We have better Rhino compliance as well: Rhino objects can be used in templates as scalars, numbers, and booleans, following the JavaScript conversion semantics for these types.


• We created a new interface, TemplateDirectiveModel that should make writing custom directives in Java much easier than with the previous only choice, TemplateTransformModel.

And then there's the small things, i.e. FileTemplateLoader can now load templates through symlinks pointing out of its root directory (it is disabled by default however).

Performance improvements

We eliminated a bunch of repeated instanceof tests in BeansWrapper whenever a new object was wrapped. They're now performed once per class instead of once per object. Also, the FreeMarker wrapper object created by BeansWrapper when wrapping a POJO now does not create an internal HashMap automatically, but only when really needed (and it is not needed often). Thus, we eliminated one HashMap per wrapped object in lots of use cases, noticeably reducing the runtime memory footprint.

Bug fixes

As mentioned, ?c built-in now prints numbers in the expected format always. Also, there is a serious file handle leak when loading resources from JAR files from local filesystem in Sun JVMs, and we now have a workaround for it. FreeMarker will now correctly find JRE-bundled Xalan when run on Java 5 and Java 6. Also, we corrected the lookup of JSP taglib JAR files to be fully compliant with the JSP specification. And there are some more I won't go into right now - see the full changelog page linked above.