On Mon, 23 Oct 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Hi All
>
> My thanks to all of you who have put in the turbine framework and it is great to
>work with it.
>
> I am almost done with a project using turbine framework. I used webmacro site model.
>
> I also understand that velocity is being built in to turbine and there would not be
>much difference between webmacro and velocity except that the parser in velocity is
>efficient (is it right ?).
>
> My question is would webmacro be removed from turbine once the velocity is built in
>completely ? if so, How much work it would be to convert webmacro site model to
>velocity ?
There is already a Velocity service that works, and it would take almost
no work to convert your WM project to a Velocity project. There is
a template converter and the difference between the source files
is almost nothing but I'll probably make a converter to switch
a whole WM project over to a Velocity project.
Support for Velocity in Turbine will be far better then support
for WM as I spend a lot of my working time on both Velocity and Turbine.
And I will be pushing Velocity as the template engine for
Turbine: in a very short period of time the docs and sample code
will be there. Right now the example code and docs for both WM
and Velocity WRT to Turbine are rather mediocre.
Right now I can get Velocity to run faster then WM but in the long
run I don't think performance is going to be the issue, even when
Velocity templates can be compiled. Over successive versions of
both tools, each will probably hit the wall in terms of performance
and scalability.
The single greatest advantage that Velocity has over WM is
one of visibility. Velocity is an Apache project which
will go a long way toward swaying people to use Velocity
over WM. At this point we haven't pushed Velocity anywhere,
but when we release a 0.5 milestone the news will be
everywhere :-)
And by this simple fact Velocity will appear more reputable
even though WM is a good product as well. In some small
sense it will come down to marketing. This is the only
reason, I believe, Justin Wells ever wanted to merge
with Apache. He knows as well as I do that an Apache
project carries a lot of weight and I fully intend
to exploit that fact.
In addtion to the visibility, there are the people
at Apache. The developers on the other Java projects
here are an immense asset. There is a very large pool
ingenuity and talent to draw from around here and
that too is a substantial advantage for Velocity. Whenever
I have need help or a tool I have had an immediate
response from a fellow Apache developer.
We also now have a person, John Castura, who is
dedicated to making the docs excellent. Anything
that looks questionable so far is my doing: John
is working as quickly as he can to fix my editorial
shortcomings :-) So John will be working to create
a coherent set of documentation that is very usable.
WM now has Wiki and they also have Jason Hunter on
their list of contributors who is an excellent
writer. But Wiki is mostly filled with docs primarily
written by developers and because anyone can add
anything (moderated in some cases) I believe over
time the docs will begin to lack a certain level
of coherence. I don't believe Justin will have the
time to maintain that level of coherence. The docs
that are there are good and Wiki is an excellent
idea. I believe you need someone dedicated to
documentation who is not a programmer so that good
docs can be created for the user perspective and so
that work written by developers can be moulded to
the desired form. Although
I would say Jason Hunter is an exception: he is
both an excellent programmer and writer. But I
doubt he's going to spend much time editing the
docs in Wiki. I may be wrong but I believe he's
busier then all of us put together.
I think it will boil down to visibility, documentation
and usability. Being visible will allow Velocity
to attract more developers and users, and the
documentation and usability will allow us to
keep them :-)
jvz.
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