Adrian Tarau wrote:
Jonathan,
Basic common sense? Based on your long posts on Velocity forum, I think I can
ask you if you have some common sense.
Adrian, you little dipshit, whatever long posts I wrote on this forum
were responses to other public posts on the forum. I wrote you a note in
private and you responded on the public forum. That is the violation of
nettiquette I am referring to. If you don't understand that you are not
supposed to do that, as I said before, you don't understand much.
Well, it's not just that, Adrian. You're such a despicable hypocrite. I
mean, why did you respond in public to a private note? Obviously to try
to goad me into starting some kind of flame war or whatever. You try to
goad somebody into responding and then you say "tsk tsk, look what a bad
guy you are".
Typical stuff, but it's pathetic. I mean, you're pathetic, Adrian.
If you really think Velocity is a dinosaur, you could let him die(with some
respect if you say it meant something 7 years ago).
7 years ago (maybe closer to 8 years ago) Velocity was written by Jon
"Monkey see, Monkey do" Stevens as a copycat clone of an existing open
source project called WebMacro. It was such a mindless copycat job that
he even copied some rather strange limitations of WebMacro. One such
thing was that WebMacro had no support for decimal numbers, only
integers, probably because the original author had not got round to
implementing it. You know, really, it's just like a dim student who
copies another student's exam answers word for word, including the
spelling mistakes.
The really humorous thing about this is that, at a later stage, when
people showed up who obviously needed decimal numbers, Velocity
maintainers (rather than just implementing decimal number support) spent
all kinds of energy arguing that the lack of decimal numbers in Velocity
was the result of some kind of profound philosophical thinking on their
part,.. yeah, like they'd really thought about it and decided that
integers were good, but decimal numbers bad. Of course, everybody who
knew the history of the project knew that Velocity lacked decimal number
support because it was a mindless copy of Webmacro, which in turn lacked
decimal number support.
In any case, do you think that's really a very nice thing to do? You
write a mindless copy of somebody else's work and then you use the
apache.org projection to eclipse the original pioneering work? It's the
kind of thing Microsoft historically does, but at least that's to make
money, so it makes sense. The origins of the Velocity project really are
in behavior that is somewhat pathological.
I mean, how would you feel about this if you were the original author of
WebMacro? It's really not very nice. These really aren't very nice people.
Now, to be fair, all the original authors of Velocity, anybody who
designed or implemented any significant part of the codebase, are long
gone. What you have now is a set of poeple who have taken on the role of
being "owners" of the project, because it's some kind of feather in
their cap or something. But really, if you really look at it, what
they're doing is totally masturbatory, putting out infinitesimal
incremental releases of a product that is 6 years behind the state of
the art in its space.
And again, aside from being rather pathetic, is that really a very nice
thing to be doing? I mean, the problem is that a lot of people in this
field are pressed for time and cannot evaluate everything properly, so
many people see something is on apache.org, and they reason, okay, I'm
using the Apache Web Server, or I'm using tomcat, so it makes sense to
use the templating engine that comes from apache. So this, and basically
anything on apache.org, gets a level of attention and usage totally out
of proportion to its technical merit. So, you can see why people would
end up thinking that Velocity is a reasonable option and use it.
The problem is, of course, that, eventually many people end up realizing
waht's up with this. Consider what Max Andersen is saying in this blog
entry: http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/AStoryAboutFreeMarkerAndVelocity
Here is a quote:
"The choice originally fell on Velocity since it was the biggest player
around, and I added it naively thinking that the error and log handling
could not be that bad if so many people were using it and if there were
an issue it would be fixed soon. As time went by I learned that it was
definitely not the case."
He's openly saying that he didn't research the alternatives, because it
was highly visible and he figured it couldn't be that bad (though he
later learns it is... :-)) Basically he's saying in code: "Jeez they
tricked me, I thought this was something fairly up to date that was
being properly maintained, but it's not. Don't be tricked."
If you think FreeMarker is the brightest start above the horizon,
Look, it's quite normal that I and my collaborators would take pride in
our work. That's par for the course. What my blog entry I pointed to
clearly documents is just how frequent it is that people start using
Velocity, find it insufficient, and later migrate to FreeMarker. I
pointed out that some of the most visible projects in the java world did
this: Netbeans, Hibernate, Webwork/Struts 2. They all had significant
investments in using Velocity for templating, and later switched to
FreeMarker. That's what I'm saying here:
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2007/12/velocity-of-freemarker-looking-at-5.html
I'm not saying "In my opinion, FreeMarker is great". I am saying that
the people behind these projects I mention, surely some of them among
the most talented java programmers around, did this Velocity to
FreeMarker migration. That's the point being made. If you're going to
respond to something, answer what the person is actually saying.
Of course, you don't have to trust the developers of Hibernate,
Netbeans, or Struts 2, you could do your own evaluation and come back
and tell people what you found out. That would be a much better use of
your time than pathetically trying to flame me resorting to this kind of
straw-man argumentation.
you should let the users to discover FreeMarker by themselves.
Well, that's an absurd statement in this context, because really, it's
pretty obvious that Velocity, like Struts 1.x and other obsolete things,
still has a large user base because of the visibility advantage that
these apache projects have. If somebody in my position is going to
create a better alternative, and just passively wait for people to find
out about it, that is rather ridiculous. I tend to think that we don't
do enough publicity for the project, but that's the way it goes, In the
time I have to spend on the project, I prefer to hack code rather than
write public relations stuff. And my collaborators are the same, no doubt.
If there is somebody out there looking for a template engine and he's going to stop to Velocity without evaluation other projects, it's his fault
Yes, it is his responsibility ultimately. However, much of the problem
is that people don't have the time to evaluate everything properly, and
often just choose the thing that's most visible in its space. Clearly
that's what Max Andersen (to his later regret) did. Obviously, the
people in all those projects I mentioned that switched to FreeMarker
after using Velocity extensively for some time, if they had the decision
to make over again, would have just used FreeMarker from the very start,
since that would have saved them all transition costs, and they'd have
been using the more capable tool from the start.
Yes, ultimately the developer is responsible for his or her choice of
tools. However, when you're pushing something that's obsolete, and
leveraging this apache effect to do so, you're increasing the
probability that people will opt for that.... I mean, it's not a very
nice thing to do. These aren't very nice people.
if fails(if he finally realized Velocity doesn't have all the features
he needs). It's his bad, not because Velocity is a *junk*, is just
because he didn't took some time to evaluate at least 2 projects. Even
if you fail to choose the right project(the reason doesn't matter), it
is still useful for you, everybody learns from mistakes. Even with
Velocity, most of the problems will be on your project side. Those
missing feature will not block you form releasing your project, I can
tell you that.
That you can do a lot of useful work with something that is obsolete is
not at issue. One could dust off that 386 in the cellar and fire it up
and run some old wordperfect and lotus 1-2-3 and do a lot of useful
work. The central point is whether people should be pushing something
that is technically obsolete, as if it was state of the art. I submit
that that is unethical and really, quite simply not a very nice thing to do.
Now, I was going to ignore your silly attempt to goad me by responding
to a private message on a public forum. What finally got my goat, I
think, was when Nathan Bubna referred to the proposed blockmacro feature
as an "an exciting new idea" or something like that. I mean, that kind
of thing just gets to be too much. I think JSP 2.x has had that for
years too.
If you search after "java template engine" in Google, you'll find Velocity and
FreeMarker, so it would be really hard to miss FreeMarker and choose Velocity(if you're afraid of
that). Some people could use Velocity even if it lacks some features just because of the syntax, or
just some other "stupid" reasons.
This is not about coding style, features and not even performance(even if it is an important aspect). Even if you do a code review, some similar rules applies : review the code and not the person(project), ask for the reason why the code is as it is, ask before accuse, etc, etc.
What are you talking about?
I'm not going to continue arguing with you why you shouldn't behave like this, I think if you didn't got it until now it is too late to try now. I will not be one who will "turn you to the light" :), that's my personal feeling. My personal advice is let the community to grow around you and let others live with their projects. In the end, everybody will win.
No, Adrian, everybody wins when the things being offered are all
approximately state of the art. When you have people pushing something
obsolete, at least some people lose. They waste valuable developer time
with things that they shouldn't have wasted time with. That was pretty
clearly what happened in Max Andersen's "Story about FreeMarker and
Velocity"
(http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/AStoryAboutFreeMarkerAndVelocity ) Not
only did Max lose a lot of time with Velocity, the users of his
HIbernate Tools project clearly did.
The basic logical fallacy you're engaging in is the idea that all
choices are valid. I walk into the local bakery and they've got all
kinds of bread, right? They've got french bread, german style dark
bread, sourdough, rye.... I have choice and they're all valid choices.
Yeah, that's a lot better for the consumer than only having one kind of
bread.
BUT THAT'S ONLY IF THE BREAD IS ALL FRESH!!!
If the only freshly baked bread there is the rye bread, say, and the
other choices are all several days old and stale and hard, then my
ability to choose among different kinds of bread offers no extra value.
Obviously, because there is only one kind of bread that is fresh. In
fact, in this scenario of choices, the consumer would clearly be better
off if the bakery only offered that one kind of bread, because then the
he could not ever purchase the stale bread by accident. And of course,
that becomes increasingly likely when the stale bread is displayed
prominently as if it was fresh.
And what's the difference between that and Nathan Bubna gushing about
exciting new ideas that have existed in competing products for 5 years
or more? I mean, encouraging people to be so misguided about what the
state of the art in the space is, it just leads people to waste their time.
The guy who started the original discussion (this time round, it's come
up at least a few times before, but nothing was ever done) I wrote that
guy a note in private (to which he did NOT respond in public, of course)
and a while later, I have some further correspondence with him and he is
now using FreeMarker. Just an example. Rational, pragmatic people have
no particular interest in wasting their time. He sees that another
project already has the features in mature form that he was starting to
implement in Velocity, and bango, he just switches to that.
Best wishes,
Adrian Tarau.
PS. It was not my intention to reveal your private message, it was more an "automatic" reaction to the words "project", "junk",
You're lying, Adrian. It's was not an "automatic" reaction. An automatic
reaction would involve hitting reply-to and it would go back to me. You
quite consciously changed to the destination address so that it would go
to the public forum.
"mine is better" based on my personal experience. My apologies to you.
I don't think I can accept the apology. I don't think I can accept an
apology that (a) contains an obvious lie and (b) is in a message that is
such a self-righteous lecturing tone.
Feel free to write a proper apology when you've cooled off.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
Velocity or FreeMarker: Looking at 5 Years of Practical Experience
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2007/12/velocity-of-freemarker-looking-at-5.html
> If you really want to help somebody(who reached the end of the
road with Velocity) just reply with a link to FreeMarker and let the
user decide, before you will write long(or short) paragraphs about ...
you know ... junk.
-----Original Message-----
From: news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jonathan Revusky
Sent: Saturday, March 08, 2008 4:55 PM
To: dev@velocity.apache.org
Subject: Re: Call a velocity macro
Adrian Tarau wrote:
Hello Jonathan,
/"Well, in general, once you want to do anything moderately complex with
velocimacros, the thing breaks because it's.... *junk.* :-)"/
It's not nice to say about a different library(a "competitor") "it's
junk", even if the library is not as good as yours(I'm not sure if you a
commiter or just a user of FreeMarker).
What's not nice and a clear violation of nettiquette, as well as basic
common sense, is to respond to a private message (one that was clearly
meant to be private) in a public forum.
Well... okay, I guess you just don't know that. If you don't know, you
don't know. However, it stands to reason that if you don't know that,
there are may be plenty of other basic things you don't know.
So, first of all, there is no onus on me, particularly in a private
note, to pretend that I think that Velocity is anything other than
obsolete junk.
I agree, velocity has some weak parts, but this doesn't mean is "junk".
Well, that's debatable. There's no clear definition of what "junk"
means. A key characteristic of junk, at least most junk, is that, at one
point in the past, it was something of value. Some 386 or 486-based PC
lying around in someone's basement is junk, but at some point in the
past, it was a highly valued state of the art piece of equipment.
Getting back to niceness, since you accuse me of not being nice, one
thing that wouldn't be nice would be to sell that old 386 or 486 to
someone who had no knowledge of computers and represent that it was
something that was state of the art and so on.
I'm not pro Velocity and against FreeMarker of vice versa, and I am glad
for the existence of projects like Velocity or FreeMarker(all the Apache
projects, etc).
Besides nettiquette, a whole aspect of this you don't seem to understand
is that projects are really only useful if they are approximately
competitive with the state of the art in their space. I could write a
simple text editor or database this weekend and start announcing it on
all the appropriate forums. However, it would be a complete and utter
waste of time. Not only would I be wasting my own time (no big deal) but
I would trying to get people to waste their time as well. When things
like emacs and jedit exist, nothing I could write in short order would
be remotely of any interest to anybody. Look, it takes a certain ego and
nerve to announce your work to fellow professionals on places like
freshmeat.net and theserverside.com etcetera. To do this takes a certain
ego. You have to believe that, what with all the things out there that,
people really should take the time to look at what you've done. It has
to be broadly competitive with the state of the art.
So let's play nice...You can post articles about "FreeMarker is better
that Velocity" but do it with professionalism.
The whole idea that I, in the name of "professionalism" have to pretend
that the emperor is wearing any clothes, particularly in a private note,
is just absurd. Even in public there is no particular need for me to do
so. You may have noticed that people who review movies online and
elsewhere do not feel obliged to tell you that every movie that comes
out is actually good. And likewise, I am under no obligation to say that
every software tool out there is good. I don't consider Apache Velocity
to be something of high quality, to say the least. Not only is it
lacking in features that really should be considered by now to be basic
to templating in the web space, it embodies numerous first order
mistakes in design and implementation that, in over 7 years of
existence, nobody has put in the effort to remedy.
In my considered opinion, it is naive and misguided to feel gratitude to
ASF for something like Velocity. I believe that if Apache were run in a
way that really reflects its charter, to be of benefit to the overall
developer community, something in the state of Velocity would be labeled
as abandonware. Basically, the maintainers would have been put on notice
that they had to either get the thing in a state that it is
approximately competitive in its space, or the front page of the project
would say something like "Hi, I'm an abandoned piece of software. If you
want to adopt me, here is the procedure to do so." If Velocity and the
other many projects in the same state were labelled that way, it would
be of much greater benefit to the larger community. First of all, people
would be dissuaded from investing energy into something that is obsolete
and unmaintained. Also, people who actually do want to do the work of
maintaining the project would have a chance to do so.
But alas, obviously this is not the case. And specifically, that is why
so many software projects out there have initially used Velocity (based
on the belief that it was approximately competitive and being
maintained) and later had to switch to another tool, typically
FreeMarker. Some of the best known open source projects in the java
world went this route -- Hibernate, Netbeans, WebWork/Struts 2.
Obviously very many valuable developer man-hours were squandered this
way because Velocity was advertised as an active cutting edge project
when it wasn't.
I document this in a blog entry. See:
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2007/12/velocity-of-freemarker-looking-at-5.html
PS . My framework(yet another java framework??? :) ) allows me to choose
between any template engine without modify any Java code so it is
transparent for me in general. This situation with calling dynamically a
macro is the first exception in years, usually I have anything I need in
Velocity, I don't need to think about another library(not that the
Velocity is the only good template engine, but I got used with it).
What you are saying is a big nonsequitir really. If I only used the 386
or 486 computer I mentioned above (along with applications of that
vintage) I would probably think it was great, assuming that I had no
exposure to the current state of the art in personal computing. Sure,
it's probably true that you have not felt that features were missing
from Velocity. Similarly people who have only used procedural
programming languages like C or FORTRAN or whatever, may feel that they
are not missing any of the features in more modern object-oriented
languages. However, once they do make the migration, they realize that
there are many far more elegant maintainable solutions to problems that
are now easy to implement that were not really possible before. In any
case, we see from many of these threads that other people are feeling
the lack of basic templating features -- macros with an associated
block, optional/default parameters, and so on.
In any case, I imagine you (and some other people) won't be happy about
this note I have written. However, you do seem to be suffering from some
very basic misconceptions about.... well... a whole bunch of things. I
write this on the forum, not just because you replied to me here, but
also because surely other people are suffering from similar
misconceptions, and if you don't take what I'm saying to heart, maybe
somebody will, so I won't be just venting. It will have served some purpose.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project http://freemarker.org
Velocity or FreeMarker: Looking at 5 Years of Practical Experience
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2007/12/velocity-of-freemarker-looking-at-5.html
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
Adrian Tarau wrote:
I've always used #if to implement the 'switch' but I think, even for
3-4 conditions, the template will look cleaner.
Instead of
#if('renderLabel' == $macroToCall)
#renderLabel($component)
#elseif('renderInput' == $macroToCall)
#renderInput($component)
#elseif(...)
...
#end
we will have
#call($macroToCall $component).
This kind of thing is trivial in FreeMarker. For example, suppose you
had:
<#assign macroHash = {'renderLabel' : labelMacro, 'renderInput' :
renderMacro, .... >
and then, supposing you have an action string, like suppose:
[#assign action = 'renderLabel']
then you could invoke the macro via:
<@macroHash[action] component />
The thing is that macros in FreeMarker are variables, and can be in
hashes or assigned to variables or whatever, and also the foo in
<@foo/> to invoke the macro can be any arbitrary expression.
So, for example, suppose the macro you want to invoke is in the string
macroName, you could invoke it via:
<@.vars[macroName] component/>
(.vars is a special built-in hash that contains the variables
available in the template and since macros are variables as well,
.vars[macroName] is the macro with the name macroName and it can be
invoked this way, or you could create a variable.
<#assign myMacro = .vars[macroName]>
and invoke it via:
<@myMacro component/>
Right below this, Mr. Van Bergen mentions Anakia, which is an add-on
to Velocity for processing XML. He neglects to mention that FreeMarker
provides similar XML processing functionality (though the
implementation is much more complete, since it supports XML
namespaces, for example) as part of its core feature set. Declarative
XML processing is supported in FreeMarker via the #visit and #recurse
directives, which are core directives in the FreeMarker language. One
would infer from what the article says that XML processing is a point
in favor of Velocity, when, really, quite the opposite is the case.
The XML processing functionality available for Velocity is add-ons
like Anakia and DVSL that are basically abandonware, where the XML
processing support in FreeMarker is a core part of the product, and is
clearly supported.
Well, in general, once you want to do anything moderately complex with
velocimacros, the thing breaks because it's.... junk. :-)
Here is a blog entry I wrote regarding some of this sort of thing:
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2007/12/velocity-of-freemarker-looking-at-5.html
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
In case of a value outside the 'domain' you will get an exception
"Macro not found ....".
We could have even a directive which will simulate the switch default
branch.
#callWithDefault($macroToCall $defaultMacro ....) - of course the
name should be shorter.
Christopher Schultz wrote:
Adrian,
Adrian Tarau wrote:
I have the following problem : I would like to call a macro but the
macro
name must be a variable.
This is more of a question for the user's list, not the dev list. In
the future, please post there.
Ex: instead of #renderLabel($component) to have #call("renderLabel"
$component) - of course "renderLabel" can be any (existing) macro
name.
How many possibilities can you have for $component? Are they
unlimited, or constrained to maybe 5 possibilities? I'm wondering
because you could easily do it like a switch:
#if('renderLabel' == $macroToCall)
#renderLabel($component)
#elseif('renderInput' == $macroToCall)
#renderInput($component)
#elseif(...)
...
#end
-chris
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