Thymeleaf — Templating Engine

Sandhuya Sharma
4 min readSep 15, 2024

When developing web applications in Java, especially with **Spring Boot**, **Thymeleaf** is often the templating engine of choice. It allows you to serve dynamic web pages by integrating with Java objects and HTML views. Thymeleaf is designed to process HTML, XML, JavaScript, and other web formats while maintaining a natural templating syntax that feels very close to standard HTML.

In this guide, we will explore what Thymeleaf is, why you should use it, and how to integrate it into your Java web projects.

**What is Thymeleaf?**

Thymeleaf is a modern, server-side Java template engine used to generate web pages. It is commonly used in **Spring Boot** applications but can work independently in any Java environment. Thymeleaf allows developers to seamlessly integrate dynamic data from the backend (usually Java objects) into the frontend (HTML).

Some key features of Thymeleaf include:

- **Natural Templates**: Thymeleaf templates are standard HTML files that can be viewed in a browser without being processed by the server. This makes it easy to design and test pages during development.
- **Server-Side Rendering**: Thymeleaf renders views on the server side, which helps with SEO and provides a more secure, performant solution for certain applications.
- **Expression Language (Thymeleaf EL)**: A powerful syntax that allows you to bind Java objects to your HTML pages.
- **Support for Fragments and Layouts**: It allows you to define reusable layouts and fragments…

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