Development on Ilscipio - Enterprise Commerce Experts

Freemarker vs Thymeleaf - Which Template Engine in 2026

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you are choosing a template engine for a Java web project in 2026, it comes down to Freemarker or Thymeleaf. I built IDE plugins for both, so I have opinions and they are informed ones.

The short version: Thymeleaf is the better default for Spring Boot projects. Freemarker is more flexible when you need to render things that are not HTML. Both are mature, maintained, and production-ready. The choice depends on your project, not on which one is “better.”

How to Add a Custom Language to Your JetBrains IDE

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I needed Freemarker support in IntelliJ and it did not exist. The built-in highlighting was wrong half the time, there was no completion, and navigating between templates was guessing. So I wrote a plugin. That was plugin number one. Twenty-one more followed.

To add a custom language to a JetBrains IDE you need four things: a lexer, a parser, a PSI tree, and at least one useful feature on top. Everything else is optional but makes the plugin worth paying for.

So I Accidentally Built 22 JetBrains Plugins

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It started with a Freemarker plugin. We were using Freemarker templates in ScipioERP and the IDE support was limited - no completion, no navigation, no syntax highlighting worth mentioning. I thought, how hard can it be.

Turns out: not that hard, actually. The JetBrains platform is powerful. The documentation just does not tell you that.

One plugin became a pattern

The Freemarker plugin worked. People downloaded it. I got emails. And I noticed something: the core infrastructure I had built - the PSI tree builder, the completion engine, the settings framework - was reusable. Adding support for a new language meant implementing the grammar and a few custom inspections. Everything else was shared.