Alternatives to JSP for Spring MVC view layer

In the standard Java EE API, the only alternative to JSP is Facelets. As far now (2010) JSF is the only MVC framework which natively supports Facelets.

Spring MVC supports out of the box only JSP, but it has a configurable view resolver which allows you to use Facelets anyway. Other candiates are 3rd party templating frameworks such as Velocity, Freemarker, and Thymeleaf which can be configured as a view technology for Spring MVC. Spring documentation has integration examples with Velocity and Freemarker.

I recently discovered Thymeleaf.

It looks to be a complete replacement for JSPs and has integration with Spring MVC. The template approach looks more like HTML and may be more palatable to your UI designers. They have a small write-up that compares the two solutions side-by-side.