Hi Jonathan,
thank you for this in-depth coverage of the advantages of FreeMarker over Velocity. Let me tell you how the decision not to include the patch was done:
I asked Sebastian: What's the business value of having a different scripting engine in AndroMDA? Sebastian replied: I don't know.
Well, I can't really speak for Sebastian. Maybe he found the term "business value" disconcerting. I mean, it's clear enough that Sebastian himself had a strong preference for using FreeMarker over Velocity, and the preference was strong enough that he was willing to donate the patch.
Now, in general, you don't get that much feedback in an open-source project. (I know whereof I speak on that!) And if you have one end-user who would clearly prefer to use FreeMarker over Velocity, your best assumption is that there are various other ones that you don't know about.
So, really, that there are at least some users who would prefer to use FreeMarker, if they had the choice... well, that already implies that there is some business value to having it as an option!
That was it! Any patch that we include in the code base should cause an increase in business value of the AndroMDA product for the end user. "Increase in business value" means that with the new feature, a user gets more advantage out of his time that (s)he invests in trying out a new release of AndroMDA. I could not evaluate Freemarker myself due to time restrictions, so I took Sebastian's answer for granted that the increase in business value was unknown.
In the meantime, Anthony Mowers has replied to the original patch and has expressed my thoughts much more politely and accurately (see his posting of 2003-07-05 23:43 in the patch manager web page http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=758752&group_id =73047&atid=536547 ).
I saw that, and I am wondering, frankly, whether this focuses the discussion correctly. As a general proposition, the user is better served by choice -- by having more as opposed to fewer options. Moreover, it is clear enough that offering a choice -- in this case, between Velocity and FreeMarker -- is not technically difficult.
Now, I understand that, under certain circumstances, there is a case to be made for "friendly fascism". This is the argument that by basically forcing (or at least firmly leading) the user to write templates using Velocity, there is some advantage of standardization and so on.
It is hard to completely refute that idea. OTOH, there is also a strong argument to be made that the user is better served by choice. Also, there are, in my opinion, strong ideological reasons *not* to think you should make the choice for the end-user.
So, when I say that I wonder whether the discussion is focused properly, I am wondering whether the onus is really on the person advocating more options to defend that position. Open-source is a kind of chaotic bazaar in which the user takes from here and there and puts together what they want. It is not like the world of the "Microsoft shop" or "IBM shop" where toolsets are prescribed. I mean, given that context, there is a much stronger onus, in my opinion, for the side of a debate proposing the "friendly fascism" to make *their* case vs. the person advocating choice. Choice and openness should be the defaults, and the person who wants to restrict choice should be the person who has to make his case.
Well, having read what you have told me about the features of Freemarker, I would say it is at least worthwhile to make the coupling between AndroMDA and the scripting engine looser so that any skillful user can replace it easily by Freemarker if (s)he likes to do so.
How do you feel about Anthony's anxiety to split the user base and about my proposal above?
Well, I suspect that this concern is overblown. It's hard to dismiss it entirely, but simply consider the fact that supporting FreeMarker in addition to Velocity would make AndroMDA a more powerful and flexible tool and this would potentially increase your user base. Basically, the idea that you would deliberately choose a path that makes your tool less powerful and flexible in the name of not "fragmenting your user base" has aspects of cutting off your nose to spite your face, does it not? After all, if the tool is less attractive than it would be otherwise, you will have a smaller user base than you would otherwise, so...
In any case, you might also ask your users whether they would be interested, and that could provide some other data. The only datum we have on user preferences is that there is at least one user (Sebastian) who definitely prefers to use FreeMarker.
Well, on that thought, I'll close this message.
Regards,
Jonathan Revusky -- lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
Cheers... Matthias
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jonathan Revusky
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 4:18 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [Andromda-devel] FreeMarker support in Andromda
Andromda developers,
It came to my attention a little while ago that Sebastian Glita submitted a patch for FreeMarker support and this was rejected. Now, it's your project, and you can do what you want, but I think it is perfectly proper for me to write you a note explaining why, in my opinion, your rejection of the patch was mistaken.
...
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