Malcolm Edgar wrote:
Excellent choice, Velocity simplicity wins out over FM complexity :)
Nice story, nice spin on things, but it's not really accurate. If you
look at the blog article on www.niksilver.com you see in the 4th
paragraph or so:
<QUOTE>
I can’t honestly say that we ran a detailed and open comparison when we
chose a templating framework, ...
</QUOTE>
I mean, the guy is tacitly admitting that they really didn't compare
Velocity to anything else, it seems. <shrug>
To me, what this is really an example of is just how much credit people
give these Apache projects. This is a tangent, but, just as an example
of this, look at Struts. Technically, that project lapsed into a
horridly stagnant state and no forward progress was made on the project
for a period of 4 years or more. So, obviously, it became increasingly
uncompetitive with other web frameworks. Yet, still, after 4 years of
neglect, it was still dominant in usage out there. It was so inferior
that a competing web framework, Webwork, could be simply relabelled as
Struts 2.0. Basically, the Webwork people donated their work to ASF and
it got relabelled as Struts 2.0 so that they could leverage the Struts
and Apache brand names to get visibility for their far superior body of
work.
But let's step back and think about this a sec. It's really the
damnedest thing, you know. It's as if you go to the local farmer's
market, buy wonderful fresh produce, but your kids won't eat it. You
figure out that the only way to get them to eat the fresh vegetables is
to trick them, to convince them that the fresh veggies actually came out
of a tin can. Then they'll eat them. I mean, okay, it's a brutal
characterization, but I think it's accurate; people, by and large, would
not use Webwork, which was far superior to Struts, unless it got
relabelled as Struts. Then they'll all use it and, you know... yummy yum
yum.
All the stuff about Velocity being better because it's "simpler" is
pretty suspect. After all, if you look at the Velocity 2.0 roadmap, you
see that every new thing being proposed is stuff that was already
available in FreeMarker at least 4 years ago. It's obviously considered
that the extra features are desirable. Yet, when you talk about the
advantages of Velocity, it's the simplicity -- i.e. the lack of features
that is supposed to be an advantage.
So, you know, given that, I find it hard to believe that anybody who
wasn't born yesterday would take the simplicity rhetoric that seriously.
And, look, googling around, do you find anybody actually saying they
switched from FreeMarker to Velocity because they like all that
wonderful simplicity? No, you don't, you find people switching in the
other direction because they need the extra features; they were
specifically added because they do enhance productivity and so on.
The fact remains that people who work on front-end coding already deal
with things that are pretty complex. Even static HTML is fairly complex,
lots of tags and attributes. Introduce style sheets and even just a
smattering of javascript and you really have something that's pretty
complex. Complexity is a difficult thing to talk about, mind you, since
it's hard to precisely measure. But my sense of things is that
FreeMarker, within the range of things that these people work with, is
not excessively complex. I think it's much more accurate to say that
Velocity is excessively simple. This would be backed up by any searches
on the web, where people state clearly that they switched away from
Velocity because it simply does not have features they need in a
professional tool of this nature.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
I mean, there's so much insincere doubletalk. The @author tags
discussion over the dev list is just amazing.
regards Malcolm Edgar
On 5/10/07, Townson, Chris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
http://niksilver.com/2007/05/10/guardian-unlimiteds-new-look-s
thought this might interest members of this list, if you haven't
already seen it.
It would be interesting to know a little more about the tools they
built: I know that we at Nature have been working towards a
"component"-based system (which seems to be what they've developed at
The Guardian) for a little while now and are shortly to go live with a
Spring-based system for formalizing the management of the design and
templating of large, complex, modular sites using Velocity.
There might be some common ground covered between us and The Guardian
here which could be fed back into the Velocity project itself, perhaps?
Best,
Chris
********************************************************************************
DISCLAIMER: This e-mail is confidential and should not be used by
anyone who is
not the original intended recipient. If you have received this e-mail
in error
please inform the sender and delete it from your mailbox or any other
storage
mechanism. Neither Macmillan Publishers Limited nor any of its agents
accept
liability for any statements made which are clearly the sender's own
and not
expressly made on behalf of Macmillan Publishers Limited or one of its
agents.
Please note that neither Macmillan Publishers Limited nor any of its
agents
accept any responsibility for viruses that may be contained in this
e-mail or
its attachments and it is your responsibility to scan the e-mail and
attachments (if any). No contracts may be concluded on behalf of
Macmillan
Publishers Limited or its agents by means of e-mail communication.
Macmillan
Publishers Limited Registered in England and Wales with registered
number 785998
Registered Office Brunel Road, Houndmills, Basingstoke RG21 6XS
********************************************************************************
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
