This discussion is from some time ago but I was wondering whether there has there been any progress with tools (hopefully graphical) for editing Velocity templates. Our company has continual problems with the tools that our html folks use - it does some very wierd things to the velocity that requires a lot of cleanup.
Bill - Were you able to make your HTML-Kit velocity support documentation available? If so could you point me to it? thanks- Dave ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bill Burton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, October 12, 2001 8:01 PM Subject: Re: Velocity editing tool > Hello, > > "Gonzalo A. Diethelm" wrote: > > > > Is anybody aware of a graphical editing tool, free or commercial, > > for Velocity templates? I'm thinking of something like DreamWeaver > > but able to grok embedded Velocity code. > > > > Is it possible to teach any existing HTML editing tool to understand > > Velocity? Any recommendations? Thanks, > > I've been using HTML-Kit (http://www.chami.com/html-kit/), a really nice > Windows based freeware HTML editor. It's highly extensible in many > different languages, i.e. hkScript (JavaScript), Java, Perl and C++. > Slowly I've been adding various things to make editing Velocity files a > bit more natural and user friendly. > > With the plugins generator, a GUI tool for generating plugins, it made it > easy to create a toolbar with support for the Velocity directives. Adding > support for the Turbine Velocity macros would be very easy. > > With HTML-Kit you have the ability to specify a URL which is used by the > Preview tab when you want to preview files. I configured this so that > files under a certain local path are previewed through Tomcat running on > http://localhost:8080. > > The HTML-Kit Workspace support expands this concept to also work with FTP > as well as local files. In the tree view, you can right-click on a .vm > file, select the Preview option and it will be previewed through whatever > web server is configured for that part of the Workspace. Of course, this > works equally well for JSP's, etc. > > Unfortunately, there's no way to configure highlighting for Velocity > directives or Velimacros as the parser isn't configurable. However, given > all the other advantages of using this editor, this isn't a big deal. The > directives and Velimacros show up in black which is different than almost > everything else in an HTML file so they are easy to pick out. > > The keyword help is extensible to use either local or remote HTML files. > By creating a simple text file listing the Velocity directives and the > base URL to the documentation for them at > http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity, you can click on a Velocity directive > such as #foreach, hit the F1 key and the documentation on that directive > is displayed. This functionality could be extended for objects in the > context as well thus making it easy to add online documentation for your > own application. > > I hope to finish documenting the Velocity support I've written for > HTML-Kit and make it available soon. > > Another editor you might want to check out is jEdit > (http://www.jedit.org), a Java based editor. In the recent 3.2 release, a > Velocity mode was added. However, all this affects is syntactic > highlighting of the default Velocity directives. Adding support for > Turbine or other Velimacros should be easy by modifying the velocity.xml > configuration file. JEdit is highly customizable as evidenced by the > plugins available. > > -Bill > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
