When I have to write an internal tool I use Freemarker as my templating engine of choice, because in one file I can write html, and then access Java objects that are passed in a model. Its faster to use for development than engines like Velocity or XMLC, and has enough functionality to write the UI for a tool. The Java objects values are resolved using reflection, to either Strings or Integers.
Recently I ran into a browser compatibility issue. When I used the following code
<#assign currentDate=myObject.todaysDate?date?string.short>
<td>${currentDate}</td>
The dates would render the current date but in the wrong millenium only in Firefox.
The solution is to instead do the following:
<td>${myObject.runDate?date}</td>
The correct date is printed. The format is month name, date, and year, and it also contains a timestamp.
