The RIFE framework lead developer just posted a blog post asking user feedback for the best/easiest/more-intuitive way to implement the templating for RIFE. I’d go with regular tags because IDE’s support them, but I must say that the Velocity and Tapestry approach looks interesting as well. I can’t say I like neither the current nor the processing instruction variant syntax, am I missing out something?
My objection to Velocity/Tapestry/FreeMarker and other alternative approaches is that IDE’s don’t offer as good support as JSP taglibs or JSF. These communities should try to extend the eclipse WTP editor and NetBeans in order to speed up the syntax learning path.
It will be interesting also to see what new syntax will JSP 2.1 introduce to ease integration with JSF as well.