JTE, the JVM, and the static-site gap

Francesco Bilotta — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Our studio stack is Java + Spring Boot + JTE (gg.jte) + htmx + Lit. JTE is a great template engine: compiled, type-safe, context-aware HTML escaping. The natural instinct is to keep it for the static site too.

The problem: no mature static-site generator renders JTE.

JBake uses Freemarker, Groovy, Thymeleaf, Jade, or Pebble. Not JTE.
Roq (the Quarkus SSG) uses Qute. Not JTE.

So a JTE-native SSG does not exist. If you want JTE, you build the static-generation layer yourself: routing, content collections, a Markdown pipeline, RSS, sitemap, image optimization, asset bundling. Each of those is a solved problem in the JS ecosystem and a from-scratch job on the JVM.

That is the real decision: not "JTE or not", but "do I want to maintain a bespoke SSG so I can keep JTE on a site that renders the same HTML every build?"

For a personal site, the honest answer is usually no.

Rebuilding this site as a static site

Francesco Bilotta — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The previous version of this site was a small Spring Boot application: a home page and an in-memory blog. It worked, but it was a server running just to hand back HTML that never changes between deploys. For a personal site that is pure overhead: a JVM, a process, a host, a thing that can fall over at 3am.

A static site removes all of that. The pages are generated once at build time and served as plain files from a CDN. No server, no database, no runtime to patch.

What I want from the tooling

File-based routing, so a new page is just a new file.
Content collections with a schema, so a typo in a post's frontmatter fails the build instead of shipping broken.
Markdown with real syntax highlighting out of the box.
RSS and a sitemap generated for me, not hand-maintained.
Image optimization without wiring a pipeline by hand.

The question I'm working through is whether to get those from an off-the-shelf generator, or to keep the JVM stack and build a bridge to fill the gaps.