I certainly prefer FreeMarker, as it has many more features related to the
template design. WM seems to have gained its popularity from its
introspection engine, I am still up in the air on how superior it is over
FM's simple Hash and List way of setting up the Context. It's seems like a
big time savings; just throw your business object into the Context and it is
available. But there are generally formatting issues related to visual
display that are not really appropriate in the business oject. So you end
up overloading your business objects with display oriented methods or
duplicating your business objects. If you prefer the first WM is superior.
If like me, you prefer to create wrapper classes for display formatting, WM
and FM are fairly equivalent.
As WM lacks many features needed in a template system from the design
perspective: e.g. simple conditionals like #if (template == "add_user"), it
can be difficult to use. It would also be nice to have a method to remove
whitespace.
But, it seems developer interest is with WM. If you can live with its
limitations you should probably use it. I will continue to develop the FM
service as long as WM does not meet my needs. It would be nice to try to
develop some interfaces so that either can be used easy and alot of code
that is being duplicated could be consolidated. I have that as an item on my
personal todo list, but it is not a high priority.
John McNally
----- Original Message -----
From: William KC Wong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2000 9:04 PM
Subject: Re: WebMacro Proof of concept...
> What about FreeMarker ? Has there been any development on this excellent
> template system ? I know that John McNally has been the main contributor
> to this engine. Will this template be supported (in Turbine) in future ?
> Or am I missing something that all focus is now on WM ?
>
> -another non-JSP user
>
> >In previous e-mails, its been mentioned that the User admin
> >inteface will be implemented using the new WebMacro service.
> >I'd also like to redo the scheduler interface using the new WM and
> >remove all the older WM stuff.
> >However, doing this has a couple ramifications to the Turbine setup.
> >
> >For Turbine to work out of the box, default.page and the
> >default.sessionvalidator must be set in the TurbineResources
> >distibution file to the WebMacroSite service.
> >Doing the above will probably push new users of Turbine
> >to use WebMacro and cause current users to reconfigure a few things
> >when updating to a newer version of Turbine.
> >
> >IMO, this forces a change in direction for the Turbine
> >default presentation mechanism (from ECS to WebMacro).
> >
> >Is this a direction we want to move or should we look at a better way
> >to integrate the two out of the box?
> >
> >Either way involves configuration issues/decisions.
> >
> >Is a vote in order?
> >
> >--
> >dave
> >[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >-----------------------
> >"I find it the same with all pleasures within my reach; unless
> >they cost me nothing, I find them insipid."
> > Rousseau
> >
> >
> >------------------------------------------------------------
> >To subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >Problems?: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >
>
> ________________________________________________________________________
> Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> To subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Problems?: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------------------------------------
To subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Problems?: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
