Regarding if it's an useful contribution to the project. Currently, the Apache FreeMarker (incubating) project is only the engine itself. So unless we widen the scope of the project, while it certainly helps with the popularity/usefulness of the FreeMarker project, it's not a direct contribution to it.
Some may point out that the project already have multiple "products", all in its own repository (but still under the umbrella of the Apache FreeMarker project): - freemarker: The engine itself, freemarker.jar. This is the only thing has releases. The others are just dependencies. - freemarker-docgen: Transforms XDocBook to HTML. The reason it's here is that both our homepage and the Manual are generated with this. - freemarker-site: The content of the homepage - Recently we started working on bringing over the small project behind http://freemarker-online.kenshoo.com/. So it's just yet another 3rd party tool, so why bring it in as a "product" of the project? The intent is that it will be part of our home page (so it's not a product with actual releases). It's a "tool" for trying out the engine itself, it has no other intended utility, so it fits in. Though the real incentive was that we saw the service being endangered (becoming outdated, etc.), and we want a service where the users can try the engine quickly. Also we have contributed to it substantially... we don't want those work hours to be lost. So these are all stuff used for publish/documenting the engine itself. But I'm not saying that it's totally impossible to bring in standalone tools as additional "products". I'm just not sure if we want get into that business. Because, what policy we want to follow? Why some project remains on GitHub, and why some become products of the FreeMarker project? Is that good for the ecosystem? (BTW, there's FMPP for example, another command line tool for FreeMarker. It has always remained an independent GitHub project. It was actually written by me (when I was still quite junior so I'm not very proud of it... but it works), so surely I could use my influence, but I just think it fits in. However, it's linked from the freemarker.org side menu, for ages... can be seen as an abuse of power. (-: Heck, I have never though of that... I will remove that link. But, note that freemarker-online is also linked there, simply because it's quite useful for many users. So for widely useful and proven stuff that's a possibility.) Anyway, anybody has thoughts about this? Monday, March 6, 2017, 12:07:26 PM, Siegfried Goeschl wrote: > Hi folks, > > I'm playing around with Template Engines for a couple of years and > over Christmas I moved some of my code from Velocity for FreeMarker. > > One piece of code which could be useful to the public is > https://github.com/sgoeschl/freemarker-cli > <https://github.com/sgoeschl/freemarker-cli> > > * Don’t now if I already re-invented the wheel :-) > * Please note that this is my first contact with Apache FreeMarker > * I would like to ditch Groovy and migrate to a stand-alone Java application > * It is already under ASL-2.0 > > So the question is - could this be a useful contribution to the > project?! As far as I know open source is not oneway only :-) > > Thanks in advance, > > Siegfried Goeschl > -- Thanks, Daniel Dekany
