type safe templating

Overview

Within a Java program, each Jamon template is represented as an instance of a class specific to that template. In order for your program to compile, Jamon templates need to be translated into Java source classes, and those generated Java sources need to be included in the build of your project.

Assumptions

Building with Maven

Jamon releases are now mirrored on the primary Maven repository sites (http://repo1.maven.org/). All Jamon artifacts (aside from Eclipse plugins) should be available there. Generally, there are three sections of your pom.xml that will need to be configured.

1. Compile and runtime dependency

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.jamon</groupId>
      <artifactId>jamon-runtime</artifactId>
      <version>2.3.0</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

2. Hook into project build lifecycle

<build>
    <plugins>
        ...
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.jamon</groupId>
        <artifactId>jamon-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.3.2</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <phase>generate-sources</phase>
            <goals>
              <goal>translate</goal>
            </goals>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
        ...
    </plugins>
</build>

3. (Optional) Hook into Eclipse

(Yes, this is far from optimal.) Add the following to the plugins section, ensuring the templateSourceDir and templateOutputDir match your project: 
  <plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-eclipse-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
      <additionalProjectnatures>
        <projectnature>org.jamon.project.jamonnature</projectnature>
      </additionalProjectnatures>
      <buildcommands>
        <buildcommand>org.jamon.project.templateBuilder</buildcommand>
        <buildcommand>org.eclipse.jdt.core.javabuilder</buildcommand>
        <buildcommand>org.jamon.project.markerUpdater</buildcommand>
      </buildcommands>
      <additionalConfig>
         <file>
             <name>.settings/org.jamon.prefs</name>
             <content># now
eclipse.preferences.version=1
templateSourceDir=templates
templateOutputDir=tsrc
</content>
        </file>
      </additionalConfig>
    </configuration>
  </plugin>

Customizing the plugin

You can change the location where the plugin looks for template sources and the locaiton where it generates Java files by specifying the properties for jamon.template.src and jamon.template.output in each execution section above. For example, to root your template sources at src/main/jamon and generate Java sources into src/gen, your execution section would look like: 
<build>
    <plugins>
        ...
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.jamon</groupId>
        <artifactId>jamon-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.3.2</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <phase>generate-sources</phase>
            <goals>
              <goal>translate</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
               <templateSourceDir>src/main/jamon</templateSourceDir>
               <templateOutputDir>src/gen</templateOutputDir>
            </configuration>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
        ...
    </plugins>
</build>