It works fine in the TDK, although it took me about 5X longer to implement it than I thought it would. Some of that was due to my own poor ability to project plan, but a lot was due to the unexpected difficulty of troubleshooting. The documentation is very incomplete - understandably, since this is a volunteer project. When things didn't work the way I expected it took hours and days to tease the solution out of the mail list archives and the unstructured documentation.
I think I've just stumbled across another major reason NOT to use Turbine. My application, which uses lots of Velocity templates rather than JSPs, is not at all portable to other servlet containers. Naively, I installed Tomcat without Turbine on my "production" machine (an old PC in my home but it hosts my Apache HTTP web server) thinking I could deploy the app there. Imagine my "well, duh!" when I realized that Velocity is needed to parse and translate my templates.
It occurs to me that an app developed in Turbine using Velocity templates is not portable to any other application server. If I had used JSPs instead, I could port it to any app server that has a compliant servlet container. Considering that very few ISPs support full blown Apache HTTP server - Turbine - Tomcat - Velocity platforms, this seems like a pretty big limitation.
Yes, I can develop JSP or stricly servlet applications in Turbine, but without Velocity what's the point? Why not just use Tomcat alone? The documentation is much better, the infrastructure is simpler, and the connection to Apache HTTP web server is fairly straightforward.
One argument for using Turbine might be that, for large-ish scale development where you have graphic designers doing the page layout, the Velocity syntax is a hell of a lot easier for them to understand than Java syntax in JSPs. I don't consider this much on an argument. Writing the Velocity code presumes a good understanding of the context objects it references, so I think the Java programmers have to do a lot of this anyway.
Another might be the rich facility Turbine offers for navigations and layouts. Can't this be handled pretty easily with a similar directory structure and conditional JSP include directives?
I'm probably missing important points, but I think this is a good thread to start. People just getting started with Turbine need to know what it CAN'T do as well as what it can do.
-- George Allaman Denver, Colorado 303 466 2114
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