Chapter 5. Templates
5.1. Smooks Templates
Note
Since JBoss Fuse 6.3, the Smooks component for SwitchYard is deprecated and will be removed in a future release of JBoss Fuse.
The two kinds of templates available in Smooks are FreeMarker (http://freemarker.org) and XSL (http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/).
These technologies can be used within the context of a Smooks filtering process. This means that they:
- can be applied to the source message on a per-fragment basis. This is in contrast to the fragment-based transformation process which is applied the whole message. Applying them on a per-fragment basis is useful when there is a need to insert a piece of data into a message at a very specific point, such as when adding a header to a SOAP message. In this case, the process can be "aimed" at the fragment of interest without disrupting the rest of it.
- can take advantage of other Smooks technologies such as the Javabean Cartridge, which can be used to decode and bind message data to the bean context. It can then make reference to that decoded data from within the FreeMarker template. (Smooks makes data available to FreeMarker.)
- can be used to process huge; message streams (those which are many gigabytes in size) while at the same time maintaining a simple processing model and a small memory footprint.
- can be used to generate split message fragments. These can then be routed to physical or logical endpoints on an enterprise service bus.
