Thymeleaf vs Tiles

Question

I plan to port a MVC app from Spring 3 to Spring 4 using Spring Boot.

This webapp use Apache Tiles.

I'm a bit confused considering Thymeleaf seems to be the new standard with Spring, with nice integration.

Tiles was a pain to configure in this app.

We've got like 20 JSP pages in this app.

Questions :

• Does Thymeleaf and Tiles are similar concepts ? (template engine ?)
• I've seen that Thymeleaf could be used with Tiles... I can't see how and why
• Would it be better to keep Tiles and make it working with a Spring 4 / Boot application ?
• Would it be better to port Tiles/JSP to Thymeleaf templates ?

Answer 1

I would suggest eventually porting Tiles to Thymeleaf, but you don't have to do it all at once.

Your intermediate strategy could be to start using layouts and integrating existing Tiles where it makes sense. New development can be straight Thymeleaf and you can fully port existing Tiles when it makes sense to you.

Please see the following article (you can jump to the "Thymeleaf Tiles Integration" section) and the associated example code on github.