Apache Velocity

What do you like best?

Velocity is widely adopted due to which there are nice integration options and hooks for a framework like Spring (which in itself is widely used). Not only it handles the generation of web pages (.jsp) for Java EE stack but can also deal with generation of XML and SQL files.

What do you dislike?

Not much fixes or new releases available (with any new substantial feature additions). Cannot blame anyone as the Project is every developer's responsibility. New team members (new to Velocity) do take bit of time to let velocity templating work for them and its prone to mis-configurations which are not easily traceable.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Need for better developer community environment to invite more contributions from heavy users of Velocity template users. There are quite a good number of issues that are reported but never fixed, again relates to the developer community dynamics.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Making the front-end layer extremely usable and maintainable by using Apache Velocity templates. Definitely great for JSP based Java EE web applications. Nice benefit whenever a new front-end web page needs to be created, a lot of boiler-plate HTML, CSS and JS based code is resolved by templating itself.