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Building Dynamic Web Apps

Thymeleaf is a modern server-side Java template engine.

The Problem with JSP​

Historically, Java developers utilized JavaServer Pages (JSP). JSP files operated functionally, but they had a major flaw: they could not be opened in a standard web browser without compiling a local backend server first. Running raw JSP displayed Java code and broke the HTML layout.

Thymeleaf Natural Templates​

Thymeleaf solves this using "Natural Templates." It injects dynamic logic purely through data attributes inside standard HTML tags.

Because browsers safely ignore th: attributes, a designer can construct a home.html Thymeleaf template and open it in Google Chrome, viewing the static UI structure locally without needing any Java server.

<html xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org">
  <body>
    <h1>Welcome, <span th:text="${username}">Guest</span>!</h1>
  </body>
</html>