Velocity Engine 2.1 Release Notes

The Velocity team is pleased to announce the availability of Velocity Engine 2.1.

Main changes in this release:

• Velocity Engine 2.1 now requires JDK 1.8+ for building and JRE 1.8+ at runtime.
• Two more 1.7 backward compatibility flags, parser.allow_hyphen_in_identifier and velocimacro.arguments.literal
• New VTL syntax: alternate reference values: ${foo|'foo'} evaluates to 'foo' whenever boolean evaluation of $foo is false.
• New VTL syntax: Default block for empty loops:
  

  #foreach($i in $collection)
    ...
  #else
    Nothing to display
  #end
  

For a full list of changes, consult Velocity Engine 2.1 Changes section and JIRA changelog.

For notes on upgrading from Velocity 1.x, see Velocity Engine 2.1 Upgrading section.

Note for Velocity Tools users: Velocity Tools 3.0 is fully compatible with Velocity Engine 2.1.