One of the underlying requirements of the JSR 371 was to not re-invent any VDL (View Declaration/Definition Language) because the Java EE Platform already provides that capability in 2 different forms, i.e. JSP and Facelets. In addition, the templating solution space is already very mature (and very crowded too!), it would be a complete waste to re-invent anything around that!So instead of spending energy in re-inventing the (template) wheel, it makes more sense to spend energy in allowing to cleaning use, from the MVC API, the existing templating solutions provided by the platform: JSP & Facelets (see the javax.mvc.engine.ViewEngine interface).
One additional benefit of that approach is that the MVC API is not limited to just JSP and Facelets. It will also be possible to cherry pick and easily plug-in your preferred templating solution to any MVC JSR implementation.
Next to JSP and Facelets, Ozark (JSR 371 Reference Implementation) already support some additional templating solutions: FreeMarker, Velocity, Mustache, Handlebars and soon Thymeleaf. Some of those were contributed by Rodrigo Turini and Rahman Usta.
Do you see any templating solution missing?
If so, it's probably just one contribution away!
Disclamier: it's early days, expect things to evolve!
