Ilya Buziuk has created a prototype of a VPE template system without using JavaXPCOM to build HTML DOM tree.

The prototype is an Eclipse plugin, which reads opened JSP file and prints its HTML representation to the console.

The prototype supports two kind of templates:

1. Simple templates, stored in text files. They should NOT be necessary valid XML files, any text works. An example of their syntax:

   <newFoo>
   	<spanFoo>CHILDREN INSERTION POINT</spanFoo>
   </newFoo>
   

   , where CHILDREN INSERTION POINT is a code word. More examples may be found here.

2. Advanced Java templates implementing javax.servlet.jsp.tagext.JspTag interface. Some examples may be found here and here.

The source is available here. YouTube demo is here.