Overview
Jelly is a tool for turning XML into executable code. So Jelly is a Java and XML based scripting and processing engine. Jelly can be used as a more flexible and powerful front end to Ant such as in the Maven project, as a testing framework such as JellyUnit , in an intergration or workflow system such as werkflow or as a page templating system inside engines like Cocoon .
Jelly borrows many good ideas from both JSP custom tags, Velocity, Cocoon, Ant. Jelly can be used from the command line, inside Ant and Maven or inside a Servlet, Web Service, JMS MessageListener or embedded directly into your software.
Jelly has native support for a Velocity-like expression language called Jexl which is a superset of the JSP, JSTL and JSF expression languages as well as support for other pluggable expression languages like XPath via Jaxen , JavaScript, beanshell and Jython.
Jelly is completely extendable via custom tags in a similar way to JSP custom tags or Ant tasks. Though Jelly is really simple and has no dependencies either Servlets or JSP. So you could think of Jelly as similar to an XML-ized Velocity where the directives are XML tags. Or you could think of Jelly as a more flexible engine for processing Ant tasks with better expression, logic and looping support.
Jelly is also based on an XML pipeline architecture, like Cocoon, so that it is ideal for processing XML, scripting web services, generating dynamic web content or being part of a content generation system such as Cocoon.
External Resources
- Jakarta Commons by Torsten Curdt, Stefan Edlich, Henrik Hörning, Reidar Hörning, Software & Support Verlag, in German
Do you have a good example, add it here!
FAQ
- Where should I report issues/suggestions for Jelly?
Report issues using Jira: http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JELLY