There are several things I'd like to do for the tools before releasing them:
1) deprecate the ConversionTool:
- date formatting and parsing methods are redundant with (and less
complete than) DateTool ones.
- number formatting and parsing methods are redundant with the
NumberTool and MathTool ones, and also far less necessary now that a lot
of automatic conversions are taken care of.
- the only remaining feature is a toStrings() method (which does
splitting and optional trimming). A single method does not legitimate
the need for a tool, and in a web context, the ParameterTool already
does it for GET/POST parameters. Still, we can have the method move
elsewhere (but where? Maybe deprecate SortTool and have a CollectionTool
do splitting and sorting?).
2) deprecate MathTool number parsing and formatting methods, which are
redundant with the NumberTool ones.
3) use explicit format names: numberFormat, timeFormat, dateFormat and
timestampFormat, instead of a generic 'format' parameter defaulting to
an ubiquitous 'default' value. I'd also like to have the default formats
be the international formats used by HTML5 (RFC 3339).
4) On the same subject of formats, I'd also would like to introduce
date/time format sniffing (as there are some good algorithms out there
that we can borrow). We could maybe do the sniffing once and cache the
detected format in the AST (but it should be configurable, and probably
default to false).
5) I'm pretty inclined to deprecate AlternatorTool, since all designers
now use CSS for this purpose. Plus, we now have #if($foreach.index % 2)
for this purpose.
Claude
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