Hi Daniel,

Thanks for spending your time - feed back is always appreciated when doing 
things in isolation ....

Please see my comments below

Thanks in advance, 

Siegfried Goeschl



> On 17.12.2019, at 19:19, Daniel Dekany <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hi Siegfried,
> 
> Looks good!
> 
> Some random things I happened to notice:
> 
>   - The ability generating multiple output files from the same template
>   would be worthy addition. Like you load a CSV file that has employees in
>   it, and based on that you generate one output file per department. Or even
>   one per employee. (There could directives for that, like changeOutputFile,
>   nestOutputFile, etc. on http://fmpp.sourceforge.net/pphash.html#sect17 
> <http://fmpp.sourceforge.net/pphash.html#sect17>)

Well, I simply don't need it and it complicates things - in simple cases one 
could just re-run the freemarker-cli with a different template and/or parameters

>   - When I load an XLSX, I get back values as string, not as numbers, or
>   dates. I'm not sure how hard it is to solve though (I don't remember POI
>   much).

That should not be too hard - I actually use 
org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.DataFormatter to create the strings


> BTW, the strings I get back are formatted with the locale of the OS,
>   which is a problem. I guess there should be an config option to set the JVM
>   locale. (The ExcelToolTest fails on my computer with locale hu_HU for
>   somewhat similar reason, as it gets "100,00" instead of "100.00".)

On the command line you can use 

-l, --locale=<locale>     Locale being used for output file, e.g. 'en_US'

but I guess I should provide a fixed locale for the unit tests 

>   - Querying from relation databases (JDBC) would be probably an useful
>   addition (it doesn't fit the Document paradigm though).

I integrated commons-exec and triggered AWS CLI - basically you capture the 
output of any command-line invocation and process it. Just need to make sure 
that every tool supports processing raw strings ...

> 
> It would be good if there's some de-facto tool for these kind of things
> than what freemarker-cli does. I guess there's a few such tools in company
> repos, but of course those have no potential to become more generic and
> being published. (freemarker-generator was a such toll though, but it
> didn't go anywhere after donation. Actually, FMPP was a such tool too, that
> I used for some sysadmin/webadmin tasks some 15+ years ago.) But of course,
> long term care is the tricky issue with any project that has no company
> truly behind it (i.e., no payed developers). Do you have you have any
> thoughts/plans regarding the longer term life of freemarker-cli?

I worked on a couple of not soo successful Open Source projects - yes, it might 
become another Open Source GitHub project nobody knows / cares :-)

Having said that

* I'm maintaining it already for a few of years and I will always find some 
things I can do with it
* It is useful for some common tasks when you have a Java background
* I think it is a great way to re-use or build up FreeMarker knowledge
* And it should become part of the Apache Freemarker project - much better 
visibility & broader user base

> 
> Also, some things that you miss for FreeMarker itself for it to be more
> fitting for the task?

Support for Java 8 Date/Time API - last time I looked at it it was not 
supported by FreeMarker and it's a bummer since nobody is using Date any longer 
...

> 
> 
> On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 7:02 PM Siegfried Goeschl <
> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> 
>> Hi folks,
>> 
>> since I'm currently mostly busy with non-coding tasks I spent some time
>> honing my coding skills - probably to no avail as my colleagues would say
>> ;-)
>> 
>> 1) I migrated my pet project "freemarker-cli" from Groovy to JDK 8 (see
>> https://github.com/sgoeschl/freemarker-cli 
>> <https://github.com/sgoeschl/freemarker-cli> <
>> https://github.com/sgoeschl/freemarker-cli 
>> <https://github.com/sgoeschl/freemarker-cli>>)
>> 
>> 2) At
>> https://github.com/sgoeschl/presentations/blob/master/javameetup/freemarker/slides/src/docs/asciidoc/index.adoc
>>  
>> <https://github.com/sgoeschl/presentations/blob/master/javameetup/freemarker/slides/src/docs/asciidoc/index.adoc>
>> <
>> https://github.com/sgoeschl/presentations/blob/master/javameetup/freemarker/slides/src/docs/asciidoc/index.adoc
>>  
>> <https://github.com/sgoeschl/presentations/blob/master/javameetup/freemarker/slides/src/docs/asciidoc/index.adoc>>
>> you find a presentation I gave some while ago
>> 
>> 3) I also wrote a Spring Boot FreeMarker sample project as part of the
>> presentation (see
>> https://github.com/sgoeschl/presentations/tree/master/javameetup/freemarker/demo
>>  
>> <https://github.com/sgoeschl/presentations/tree/master/javameetup/freemarker/demo>
>> <
>> https://github.com/sgoeschl/presentations/tree/master/javameetup/freemarker/demo
>>  
>> <https://github.com/sgoeschl/presentations/tree/master/javameetup/freemarker/demo>
>>> )
>> 
>> My plans / questions
>> 
>> I would be awesome if I could get some feedback about "freemarker-cli" in
>> its current JDK incarnation :-) Later on I will release 2.0.0 and push it
>> to Maven Central.
>> 
>> In the mean time I wrote three applications (micro services in new speak)
>> using Apache FreeMarker and found it hard to find a starting point for a
>> Spring Boot applications - therefore I wrote the sample project (see
>> above). One way or the other a Spring Boot (and Micronaut) blue print
>> should find its way into Apache FreeMarker officially. I think Apache
>> FreeMarker is awesome for adding a developer UI to some micro service but
>> developers don't care about the template engine but only about a quick and
>> painless way to get the job done ...
>> 
>> Anyone volunteering to give a presentation about Apache Freemarker at
>> ApacheCon? I could do but I'm not really qualified :-)
>> 
>> Thanks in advance,
>> 
>> Siegfried Goeschl
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Best regards,
> Daniel Dekany

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