Jonathan,
Knock it off.
It's 2008. You've been unsuccessfully charging this windmill for 7 or
8 years now, and you still can't remain civil in a conversation.
Go away, please.
geir
On Mar 9, 2008, at 1:21 PM, Jonathan Revusky wrote:
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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