Date of release: 2005-06-23

Some new features and lot of bugfixes.

Attention:

• If you are using the Log4J logging, from now at least Log4J 1.2 is required. This is because of incompatible changes in the Log4J API.

• If you build FreeMarker yourself: from now at least JavaCC 3.2 (instead of JavaCC 2.1) and at least Ant 1.6.1 (instead of Ant 1.5.x) is required. This doesn't affect users who use the freemarker.jar comes with the distribution.

Changes on the FTL side

• New built-in for formatting numbers for ``computer audience'' as opposed to human audience: c. It should be used for numbers that must use Java language formatting regardless of the number format and locale settings, like for a database record ID used as the part of an URL or as invisible field value in a HTML form, or for printing CSS/JavaScript numerical literals.

• New built-in for the columnar/tabular displaying of sequences: chunk.

• The sequence slice and substring operators now allow the omitting of the last index, in which case it defaults to the index of the last sequence item or character. Example: products[2..]. (Also, numerical range literals now allow the omitting of the final number, in which case it defaults to infinity. Example: 5...)

• Bugfix: ?replace has worked forever if the string to replace was "".

Changes on the Java side

• New template loader: freemarker.cache.StringTemplateLoader. It uses a Map with Strings as its source of templates. See more in the JavaDoc.

• Experimental Rhino support: FreeMarker now comes with an experimental object wrapper for Rhino (Java ECMAScript implementation): freemarker.ext.rhino.RhinoWrapper

• Some new utility methods for SimpleXxx classes: SimpleHash.toMap(), SimpleSequence.toList().

• Bugfix: FTL literals and any other SimpleSequnce-s, and SimpleHash-es now can be used as parameters to the FreeMarker-unaware Java methods that are exposed by DefaultWrapper or BeansWrapper. That is, the method parameters are automatically converted from TemplateTypeModel-s to java.util.Map and java.util.List respectively.

• Bugfix: The JSP support now works in JSP 2 compliant containers as well. No, it doesn't support the new features of JSP 2 yet, it's just that the JSP 1.2 taglib support has not worked in JSP 2 containers.

• Bugfix: The Configuration.setOutputEncoding and setURLEscapingCharset methods died with NullPointerException when you tried to set the setting value to null, which is legal for these settings.

• Bugfix: freemarker.template.utility.StringUtil.replace(...) has worked forever if the string to replace was "".

• Bugfix: The Log4J logging was updated to be compatible with the upcoming Log4J 1.3. Note that now FreeMarker will need at least Log4J 1.2.

• Bugfix: FreeMarker didn't built from the source code on J2SE 1.5, because of the introduction of the enum keyword.

• Bugfix: The return value of SimpleSequence.synchronizedWrapper() was not properly synchronized. Same with SimpleHash.synchronizedWrapper().

• Bugfix: Problem with BeansWrapper and overridden bean methods/properties. (Details: bug-tracker entry #1217661 and #1166533)

• Bugfix: Can't access JSP taglibs if Request attribute is defined in the data-model (Details: bug-tracker entry #1202918).

• Bugfix: Various minor parser glitches were fixed.

Other changes

• Manual improvements, especially in the FAQ.