StaticMesh first cut

Rune Toalango Johannesen has created a first cut of StaticMesh - an offline version of SiteMesh for building static web-sites.

Like SiteMesh, it takes a plain HTML document (content) and an HTML decorator (presentation) to generate some pretty content as its output.

Unlike SiteMesh, it does not require a runtime Servlet engine to do this. It gets it content and decorators from files and outputs to more files.

You can run it as a standalone application, embed it in existing apps or use Ant to invoke it.

The Ant task usage is as simple as you'd expect:

<sitemesh destdir="build" decorator="mydecorator.html">
    <fileset dir="website">
        <include name="*.html"/>
    </fileset>
</sitemesh>

Content pages are plain old HTML. Anything can generate these (even MS Word!).

Decorators are also plain HTML with lots of prettyness. SiteMesh parses the content pages, which are made available to the decorator using Velocity variables such as $title and $body. Velocity is very friendly and doesn't confuse web-development tools such as DreamWeaver.

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