Hi Nathan,
I looked for the Velocity Git repo and could not find it on the Apache
Git page. I just started with the 1.7 source code and initialized my
own git repo and was making changes there. If you can post the git URL,
I could clone it and try and meld my changes on to a branch and push the
repo to Github so everyone could see it and evaluate it.
While I am not familiar with Anakia/Texen, my thought was that if others
were interested, the single module Maven project would become a
multi-module project with at least 3 child modules: velocity-core,
velocity-anakia, and velocity-texen.
I didn't start my current project using Velocity. My background is more
enterprise systems and not Android. So I started writing an XML schema
to represent my domain objects and started bumping my head on a number
of Android limitations, specific to XML. BTW, Android development tools
rock, but I quickly found out that I couldn't use JAXB, Thymeleaf, or
XMLBeans <https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=76265>.
There are several options out there for template engines, but all the
ones that would work on Android seemed very limited. As mentioned, I'd
used Velocity several times, years ago. So I figured I'd give it a whirl.
Log4j can apparently work on Android, but enough posts were out there
that made me nervous. Having already experienced problems with
libraries, I decided to pare down Velocity to its minimum. That is the
reason for trimming out the LogChute, Commons-Logging, Log4J, etc. It's
amazing how much code could be eliminated. With IoC, the tests might
even get leaner. SLF4J <http://www.slf4j.org/> is a real thin facade for
logging and there are adapters to all the other logging frameworks. It
is lightweight and there is an slf4j-android
<http://www.slf4j.org/android/> project.
I was not even aware of a 2.x branch, what its goals are, or what has
been done. I can sign a CLA. Could you please post me the git repo
that has the 2.x code? BTW, my middle name is Nathan :).
Fred
On 09/25/2014 05:49 PM, Nathan Bubna wrote:
Hi Frederick!
Thanks for posting this here. Currently, we have a 1.x branch that is
stable and in a long-term maintenance mode and a 2.x branch that is not
really ready for consumption yet. To be honest, it's been so long since i
worked on 2.x that i can't remember what changes we did get done (i could
go look). Most of the core committers are, for one reason or another,
focusing their development energies elsewhere, with little intention to get
back into it. That said, we do still actively oversee the project and are
more than willing to help mentor any newcomers in navigating the ASF
processes for contributing and working on new releases.
It sounds to me like the work you have done thus far is largely
non-compatible with the 1.x branch. In particular, the removal of
Texen/Anakia and LogChute. I'm not especially familiar with SLF4J, so i
would love to hear your reasons for yanking the LogChute adaptor instead of
just providing an SLF4J bridge for it. That said, if you are interested in
jumping in on a 2.x branch, i would help you regardless of your decisions.
People around here may have opinions on changes, but the "apache way" is
that those who do the work should make the decisions. :)
So, yes, we are interested in your work! Do you have it public anywhere we
can look at it? Are you working on a fork of our git mirror? Or did you
check it out of the subversion repo? The next question is whether you are
interested in working through Apache's contribution/committer process. If
so, you should take a look at the 2.x branch and consider putting a CLA
(contributor's license agreement) on file with the ASF secretary, as that
is needed for both large contributions and new committers (which you would
hopefully become).
-nathan
On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 5:20 PM, Frederick N. Brier <fnbr...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Dear Velocity Team Members,
I was looking for a template engine that would work on Android, and had
used Velocity a couple of times, years ago. The latest version is 1.7.
There haven't been any code changes in 4 years, although there were some
recent bug reports. Log4j has some issues on Android and I shifted to
Maven from Ant back in its 2.x days. So I restructured the codebase to use
Maven, moved the Texen and Anakia code to the side, stripped out the custom
LogChute code and changed it to use SLF4J. There are some minor problems
just getting the 1.7 source distribution to build. I found a number of
bugs along the way and a number of the unit tests were not even being run
by the Ant build. I managed to get all but one of the unit tests to work
(UberSpect related) that had been working before, and several that were
not, are now. Several unit tests depended on the LogChute architecture,
which with great difficulty, I changed. Having unit tests depend on
logging feels like a hack, is very fragile, and difficult to understand
because it isn't clear where the logging statement is being executed. It
would be much better to restructure the code to use the more contemporary
IoC design patterns, so mock objects could be injected. Injecting the
MockIntrospectorCacheImpl was painful. Another unit test motivated me to
add an initial implementation of an EventListener for the Velocity engine.
The rewritten library works under Android, but would still need a lot of
love before I'd be call it ready for a new release. What are Apache and
the Velocity team's plans for the project? Velocity is the template engine
used by Maven's Site component, so the project is still needed. My
priorities are to deliver my Android application, but if Apache is
interested, I could keep working and polishing it. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely yours,
Frederick N. Brier
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