Daniel Dekany <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Maybe we pull FM back in for 2.4-dev... :-)
The ":-)" indicates that this can be only a joke?
No. Honestly, we did remove FreeMaker because noone that uses Turbine seems to use FreeMaker as its View portion. The code simply started to rot.
Well, I think you should know that the typical view out there is that the removal of FreeMarker support from Turbine was a political, non-technical decision. Now, I'm not just saying that this is my view. (Though it has been certainly.) I correspond with various people and this topic has come up and the general assumption just was that the removal of FreeMarker support was political.
Now, I don't like to jump to conclusions and assume the worst about people's motives. However, your comments above do not really dispell my impression that the decision probably was political.
You see, your comments strike me as rather disingenuous. You state that no Turbine users were using FreeMarker. Weeeellll.... this might have something to do with the fact that you (I mean 'you' collectively, I don't know who it was) deprecated FreeMarker usage and specifically put in a note telling people "Use Velocity instead". If the Turbine developers are specifically telling you not to use FreeMarker, then most people will just not use FreeMarker.
To then say that you removed the FreeMarker support "because nobody was using it"... "Gee, well, I guess nobody is using FreeMarker, so we might as well rip out the FreeMarker support...."
Of course, aside from the fact that people were specifically told not to use it (as if that's not enough!) the other reason that nobody was using it was surely that it was not kept in synch with the main FreeMarker codebase. It only worked against an extremely obsolete version of FreeMarker. Basically, the FreeMarker support you had was the moral equivalent of supporting java, but by supporting JDK 1.0.2. Nobody excited about Java would gravitate towards a product that only supported JDK 1.0.2. They want to use a reasonably up-to-date version. Similarly, nobody who liked FreeMarker (and eager to use the new features in 2.x.) would gravitate towards Turbine and be stuck with using FreeMarker 1.5.2 or whatever it was.
Your statement that the "code simply started to rot" is hard to parse, since it suggests to me that something happened independently of you. (Again, I mean "you" collectively, the Turbine developers.) I mean, the lack of any minimal effort to keep the code up-to-date with progress in the FreeMarker project was, as far as I can see, something that you (collectively) chose. It was not something that just happened, like a piece of fruit rotting in somebody's refrigerator.
And we (unfortunately) have the VelocityContext class pretty deep meshed into parts of the internal View driver of Turbine. So working for multiple templating solutions was (with the current state of the Turbine code) non trivial.
Well, the VelocityContext, like the FreeMarker TemplateHashModel, is just a hashtable really. It is surprising to me that working towards multiple templating solutions would be anything but fairly trivial.
I know whereof I speak, since I implemented multiple templating solutions in Niggle, and it was quite trivial. I also lent a hand to Anthony Eden for implementing multiple templating solutions in JPublish, and I think that, overall, one could characterize the exercise as pretty trivial. I believe I implemented a first-pass of JPublish FreeMarker support in about an hour and sent it to Anthony. And that was without any prior knowledge of the JPublish codebase. If the code is written at all competently, supporting multiple templating solutions really is extremely trivial.
I plan to factor out the Template Code post-2.3 and get a "real" Templating service which uses the various Templating Engines as personalities transparent for the Turbine code. It should be simple to pull FreeMarker back in here if there is demand. That's what the ":-)" meant. Turbine is all about demand from its users.
I can tell you that there is at least some demand for it. This guy was interested in the Turbine/FM combo.
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=pan.2003.05.29.09.21.55.159121%40actcom.net.il
2 other people asked me the same question in private email as to whether the lack of FM support in Turbine was a political decision. Generally, people just tend to assume that it is, since FreeMarker is so far ahead of Velocity at this point in time. This also explains why Daniel Dekany assumed that you were joking when you mentioned supporting FreeMarker. People just think that the lack of support for FM is political. It's the general view out there. :-(
Best Regards,
Jonathan Revusky -- lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/ FreeMarker-Velocity comparison page: http://freemarker.org/fmVsVel.html
Regards Henning
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