Freemarker and java.time

I noticed that Freemarker¹ does not yet support the Java SE 8 Date and Time². I noticed this, because I tried it. It just tries to parse the toString() and it fails.

There's already blogs about it.

So I had to add a little dependency to provide this, courtesy of Jakob Vad Nielsen³.

<dependency>
    <groupId>no.api.freemarker</groupId>
    <artifactId>freemarker-java8</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.5</version>
</dependency>

Of course, it's not native support, you still have to call specific methods to parse this. But it works in my case.

It means I have to change some of my templates around, as described below:

Published Date ${blog.createDate?datetime}

Instead should be:

Published Date ${blog.createDate.format()}

References

[1] FreeMarker Java Template Engine

https://freemarker.apache.org/

[2] Java Technical Details - Java SE 8 Date and Time

https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/java/jf14-date-time.html

[3] GitHUb - Java library adding support for the Java 8 java.time api to FreeMarker.

https://github.com/lazee/freemarker-java-8