Interrogation about Yeoman, Maven and the location of Thymeleaf HTML templates - eclipse

Question

I recently discovered Yeoman, a tool that greatly facilitates JS dependency and build lifecycle management.
Furthermore, I use Maven as my Java dependency and build tool. I am actually seeking to integrate both tools so that I get the best of both worlds.
It seems the community has put a lot of effort into Maven/Yeoman integration with various articles such as this one: http://addyosmani.com/blog/making-maven-grunt/ as well as a yeoman-maven plugin: https://github.com/trecloux/yeoman-maven-plugin
Last, I use Thymeleaf as my Spring-MVC templating solution.
Assuming the following directory layout (see yeoman-maven-plugin above):
pom.xml
- src
- main
- java
- webapp
- …
- test
- ..
- yo
package.json
component.json
Gruntfile.js
- app
index.html
...
- test
...
- dist
...
My question is where should my Thymeleaf templates reside?
Under the yo/app directory? (they would be subsequently copied into appropriate directory by maven)
Directly under the src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/templates directory?
What I can't figure out in the case of an AngularJS application for instance, is when and how templates/pages including server-side content can interact with the servlet container given that Yeoman assumes they live under its app directory...

Answer 1

If you are using Thymeleaf as your templating engine with Spring, I assume you have something like
<bean id="templateResolver"
class="org.thymeleaf.templateresolver.ServletContextTemplateResolver">
<property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/templates/" />
<property name="suffix" value=".html" />
<property name="templateMode" value="HTML5" />
</bean>
<bean id="templateEngine"
class="org.thymeleaf.spring3.SpringTemplateEngine">
<property name="templateResolver" ref="templateResolver" />
</bean>
<bean class="org.thymeleaf.spring3.view.ThymeleafViewResolver">
<property name="templateEngine" ref="templateEngine" />
</bean>
In other words, your templates should reside in the folder specified in the ServletContextTemplateResolver property prefix. In the above example, that's /WEB-INF/templates. These should therefore be in /src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/templates.
If you are not using a ServletContextTemplateResolver, but instead using a ClassLoaderTemplateResolver, you can put them anywhere on your application classpath and specify it in that bean's properties. There's also a FileTemplateResolver in which you can specify an absolute path to anywhere on your file system.
When building the application with Eclipse (maven plugin), having the folders
/src
/main
/webapp
/WEB-INF
/templates
/some-template.html
/index.html
/java
/com
/yourcompany
/Main.java
/resources
/some-properties.properties
maven will generate the following
/WEB-INF
/templates
/some-template.html
/index.html
/classes
/com
/yourcompany
/Main.class
/some-properties.properties
As a expanded .war and provide that to your servlet container, ex. Tomcat.