I would like to apologize, It was NOT my intention to start something like this. I do NOT publish private messages on public mailing lists with the intention to make a person look bad, I'm just sensitive to disrespectful people. I just felt I had to post something on the devel list. Actually this is my first bad experience in 7-8 years on a forum/mailing list. On public or private messages I always had a civilized dialog with different software developers, even if sometime the subject was a little bit "hot".
My apologies if when I published his rant, it looked like a dishonest action on my side. -----Original Message----- From: news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jonathan Revusky Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2008 1:21 PM To: dev@velocity.apache.org Subject: Re: Call a velocity macro 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 >>>>> >> > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
