Gary Bentley wrote:
Jonathan,
I was wondering (I don't have anything to do with the Velocity project,
I receive this list because I am writing a tool that will allow one my
OS projects to be used within Velocity), why not use your energies to
lobby Apache to take FreeMarker on-board?
What for? I have no interest in that. And, especially, now that
FreeMarker has the critical mass it has, it would be almost superfluous.
There would have been more of a tradeoff, pro vs. con, back when
FreeMarker was little known. But at this stage, there are mostly just cons.
And, in general, I don't want anything to do with ASF. I consider it to
be an extremely dysfunctional organization, at least if you take the
idea that it is a non-profit foundation that exists for the public
benefit. (If the point of it is to promote the members and their work,
independently of merit, then the organization works quite well, but that
is mostly to the detriment of the public benefit.)
Oh, actually, I wrote a somewhat humorous blog entry about that subject
of potentially joining ASF. See:
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2006/02/some-comments-on-joining-jakarta-or.html
You have indicated that
FreeMarker is more advanced and mature than Velocity (and from the
limited reading I have done it appears that way) but your efforts on the
list seem like wasted effort to me.
Well, what's your basis for thinking that? I mean, there has been a huge
migration of users from Velocity towards FreeMarker. Even other Apache
projects, which are (though somebody may pop up and deny it) under some
pressure to use other ASF projects, tend increasingly to use FreeMarker
for templating. Struts 2, Open for Business, for example. I think there
are one or two others.
Now, I'm not saying that we've reached this point because I occasionally
speak my mind on this forum. But OTOH, I don't think you have much
evidence that it is ineffective. There is not much evidence either which
way on that.
From what I've read the meat of
your argument is that you are unhappy that Velocity is considered the
de-facto template engine to use because it has the Apache badge
Well, that's only the case among people for whom that Apache badge means
a lot. And, basically, for technically informed people, it surely
doesn't mean a lot nowadays. Probably, among people who do some due
dilligence on investigating their tool set, FreeMarker is the
overwhelming choice by now. You know, the fact that such projects as
Netbeans, Hibernate, and Webwork (which is now "Struts 2") used Velocity
at some point in the past and then switched to FreeMarker, this tells
you something. Any minimal amount of investigation you do by googling
around, I think you'll quickly see what's going on. You can find all
kinds of cases of people (those very prominent projects among them) who
have switched from Velocity to FreeMarker. And you cannot find a single
example of anybody going in the other direction. Try it...
and that
Joe User doesn't realize that there are better alternatives, if this is
the case then an obvious remedy would be to get the FreeMarker project
the Apache badge .
Well, there's some logic to that, but it's a perverse kind of logic. I
mean, it's like you have a local farmer's market, and you can buy
wonderful fresh fruits and vegetables there. You buy there, but your
kids won't eat the stuff. They will only eat fruits and vegetables that
come out of a tin can, made by some corporations, that market this
tinned food during the cartoons during children's TV shows, using cute
cartoon characters.
So how do you get the kids to eat the fresh local fruits and vegetables
when all they want to eat is the crap from the tin? Well, you figure it
out. You convince them that the fresh fruit and vegetables actually came
from the tin can and then they'll happily eat it. Yum, yum. (I think it
might be better to just try beat some sense into the little brats, but
that's not politically correct....)
I mean, that characterization is about right. Look at what happened with
the Struts project. It went nowhere for years, got ever increasingly
obsolete. Even without improving for 4 years or so, Struts in 2005 was
by far the most popular web application framework. A whole small
industry existed around the darned thing: books, training courses,
add-on plugins and so on... The problem was that ASF, being the
dysfunctional organization it is, the project was basically in a state
of abandonment. The committers did no real work on it, and if anybody
showed up with a fire in their belly to do some work on it, they gave
them the runaround. (You can verify all this, it's true.)
Anyway, what happened? They got the developers of a competing web
application framework, one that was far technically superior to Struts,
to donate their work to ASF, and it got relabelled as Struts 2. This was
the deal the Webwork people made to get visibility for their work. How
is this different from the fresh vegetables scenario I described? It's
as if the majority of developers would only use the far superior
framework if it got relabelled with the name of the far inferior one.
At the time that was happening, I wrote a blog entry with my reaction.
That's here:
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2006/03/musings-about-competition-ego-open.html
It's interesting to reflect on all the psychology behind this and the
perverse group behavior that makes such a story possible, but one could
go on about that and not fully explain the phenomenon. It's a tangent
but I'll share my own theory on it. Basically, I think it's a certain
kind of herding thing and the herd tends to herd around certain
reference points, even arbitrary ones, and of course, once the herding
starts in earnest around such a point of reference, call it a focal
point, it becomes a self-sustaining mechanism. You know, people use
something because the other people are using it, which in turn becomes a
reason for other people to use it, and it becomes perceived as the safe,
normal, default thing to do.
But whether my explanation for the phenomenon is right or not, it means
that, for whatever reasons ASF has become this sort of reference point
for so many people. And that is why something as technically inferior
and obsolete as Velocity, say, can still attract a lot of users.
Now, the thing is that if you have a private company, and the goal of
that company is simply to make money, it's great to have a brand-name
like that, so strong that it allows you to get away with selling
obsolete technology because people want so bad to have that brand name.
But if the point of something like the Apache Software Foundation is to
be a non-profit entity for the public benefit, well, the ability to get
people to adopt inferior, obsolete technology is not really a success,
because you were not a company trying to make money and doing that by
marketing a product. You were supposed to be operating in the public
benefit. The public benefit would be served by ASF using its "marketing
power" to promote things that are of high quality and state of the art
in their space. And if, in a given space, they don't have anything
remotely competitive to offer, they shouldn't. That would be operating
in the public interest.
Really, if I were going to lobby ASF to do something, it would be to
label honestly the various projects that they host that are effectively
abandoned, and/or obsolete wrt the state of the art in their application
space. My sense of things is that this could easily be 80% of the
projects. But obviously, it would be utterly naive to think they would
ever do that. So, given that, I'm not going to lobby them to do
anything, I don't think.
What would really be in the public interest would be a foundation that
does serious comparative reviews of different open source products.
Maybe somebody could convince the big companies that this was something
worth funding, but it would have to have the independence and integrity
to really properly evaluate things objectively -- usability, code
quality and so on. I don't know how you could ensure the objectivity and
integrity of the thing. And to quote one of my collaborators, if
something is shit, it would say it was shit, though using nicer words,
of course.
Just a thought.
Well, thank you for that. I have responded (okay, maybe at too much
length, but it's more time-consuming to write a shorter note) to the
ideas you've thrown out there.
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
Gary
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
Matthijs Lambooy wrote:
Well Jonathan gives me another good reason to use velocity
How is that a reason to use Velocity? I know you're trying to tell me
off (and suck up to the people you feel are the relevant authority
figures) but it's unsettling that there isn't even the slightest
attempt at logical (or pseudological) discourse.
Summary: A dipshit writes a response to my private message in public
and I tell him off and another self-righteous ass says I should be
banned for telling him off.
And that's a "good reason" for you to use Velocity.
I mean, there's no logical connection anywhere. It's like:
"The socialists were just reelected in Spain."
"That's a good reason to use Velocity."
"Damn right."
Why don't you just say "Yer mommy wears army boots!" or something. At
least it's something of an insult (at the primary school level anyway...)
Or really, try to make some technical argument in defense of how great
Velocity supposedly is, we could talk about that...
Thanks Jonathan!!
You're welcome, I guess.... <shrug>
Oh, here are a couple more good reasons for people to use Velocity.
The price of crude oil is at a record high. Pamela Anderson still has
big tits.
Jonathan Revusky
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