Claude, On 11/17/16 12:58 PM, Claude Brisson wrote: > 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.
Okay to all of the above. > 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). +1000 > 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). What is the use-case here? Velocity should primarily be used for output-generation, so the tools we provide should be for e.g. java.util.Date -> java.lang.String, not the other way around. I must admit, I've found myself using some Velocity-Tools classes as hacks (e.g. re-formatting a date that is in a dumb format for some reason), but it would be better not to encourage that kind of foolishness. > 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. Deprecating but not removing AlternatorTool is okay for the time being. Some of us have to support ancient browsers like MSIE8 which don't support CSS nth-child. Thanks, -chris
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