FreeMarker is a "template engine"; a generic tool to generate text
output (anything from HTML or RTF to autogenerated source code) based
on templates. FreeMarker is designed to be practical for the generation
of HTML Web pages, particularly by servlet-based applications following
the MVC (Model View Controller) pattern. Although FreeMarker has some
programming capabilities, it is not a full-blown programming language
like PHP. Instead, Java programs prepare the data to be displayed, and
FreeMarker just generates textual pages that display the prepared data
using templates. FreeMarker is not a Web application framework. It is
suitable for a component in a Web application framework, but the
FreeMarker engine itself knows nothing about HTTP or servlets.