Robert Koberg wrote:
On Fri, 2007-05-11 at 16:43 +0200, Daniel Dekany wrote:
Friday, May 11, 2007, 2:51:36 PM, Townson, Chris wrote:
2. (And this is the main reason) Because Velocity explicitly does
not attempt to be a solution which bundles everything and the
kitchen sink. The clear delineation of responsibility (basically,
taking a context+template and rendering) combined with clear
extension points and an elegant syntax made it ideal for our
purposes.
Based on what I understand from your system, you need a template
language only for some very trivial templating tasks, and then it
really doesn't mater which template engine you are using, so I won't
start debating if you have to face more complexity or less points of
extension with FreeMarker. Well, I think you wouldn't, but whatever.
I do something similar to Chris. I use XSL to create the 'runtime'
template page/code and currently can switch between velocity and JSP
since it is so simple.
THe templates generated may be simpler, but the overall architecture, a
pipeline of XML->XSLT->VTL->final output is, it seems to me, quite
complex. (Maybe it doesn't seem that way to you, but that would probably
be because you're used to it...)
Haven't tried FreeMarker.
However, I don't understand the "elegant syntax" part. I would think
that that:
#component("MyComponent", {"id":$myComponent.id})
is rather less elegant than more elegant than:
<@component "MyComponent", id=myComponent.id />
Are all/most of the FreeMarker examples in this kind of syntax rather
than your relatively new XML syntax.
At the moment, all the examples in the docs are in the older syntax.
This may change in the next release. We're seriously considering making
the newer syntax the default in the next release cycle.
Actually, in the 2.4 codebase, the parser autodetects by default what
syntax you're using, so it's just the question of what we use in docs
and examples. Also, we'll have a canonicalizer that can be run over
older templates to convert them to the newer syntax.
It would be hard for the interface
type devs to see these in your docs and mentally switch to the XML
syntax, I think. Since I use XSL/XML, it is difficult to transform out
to a non well-formed result.
Well, the alternative syntax makes this point moot, but the other deeper
point, I think, is that, once you're using FreeMarker, there isn't that
much reason to use this pipeline of generating a template with XSLT. You
could do everything with FreeMarker, since it is a very powerful XML
transformation tool in its own right. See:
http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/docs/xgui_declarative_basics.html
Likely, you could replace your:
XML->XSLT->VTL->final output
to just:
XML->FTL->final output.
And that truly would be simpler, I'd say. Of course, I told you this
before, and you weren't interested for whatever reason.
It's just that wrt the ostensible topic, the advantage of Velocity's
"simplicity", it really seems to me that in your case, as a direct
consequence of Velocity's "simplicity", i.e. that it's not a serious XML
transformation tool, you end up with a much more complex architecture
than you would otherwise. I wonder how general a phenomenon this is: the
"simplicity" of a tool actually leads directly to greater architectural
complexity. The mechanism is that the tool is not powerful enough for
the job, so you need to bring in some other tool and chain the two
things together, which actually results in a more complex system than
you would otherwise have.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
best,
-Rob
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