Jonathan Revusky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
However, I don't believe that it was why Turbine people has discontinued FreeMarker support. Most probably they was not even aware of this issue of FM 2.x series.
Probably not. Henning can correct me if I'm wrong, but I do not get the impression that they made the slightest attempt to use more current versions of FM.
No, we didn't. You're right. All of the active developers that I know
use Velocity in their projects and at least I don't see much sense in
supporting something that is not in demand by our users (on
turbine-user)
Well, frankly, I don't see much sense in putting a note on top of the FreeMarker bridge classes that says "Deprecated. Use Velocity instead." and then saying stuff like "FM support was removed because nobody was using it" or (stated in an innocent tone) "There does not seem to be any end-user demand for this" and neglecting to mention that you specifically told people not to use it!
Henning, you have heard of the "beg-the-question" fallacy, haven't you? Aren't you engaging in a version of that?
and not used by the developers (on turbine-dev).
Well, given that there is significant overlap between the core Turbine team and the original Velocity developers, it does not surprise me that they favor Velocity.
Patches are (as always) welcome. If you have a working FreeMarker templating solution (which shouldn't be too hard to do) for Turbine, we will put it into the CVS tree in a second. But please don't think that any of the active developers will spend time that is better spent on things that we _know_ that they're used than on supporting "yet another templating solution".
<sigh>
I don't know what this thing about "yet another" templating solution is. As far as I can tell, the only templating solution you support currently is Velocity. Wouldn't anyone reading this "yet another" infer that you were already supporting several of them?
But, in general, I read your messages and I have a hard time processing what you're saying. There seems to be unresolved subtext. You have expressed an interest in having a template-engine-neutral architecture. That would imply that you consider it desirable to support more than one template engine. If you do want to support another template engine besides Velocity, and that other template engine is not FM, which one(s) were you looking at?
Asides from being able to juggle with floats on a template, having a
few more control statements (such as being able to break out of a
loop) and name space support (which is nice and I'd really like to
have that in a view), I don't see too many differences between
Velocity and FM.
Well, I guess you didn't look very carefully. I gave you a list (on your request) that included significantly more checkpoints than what you have stated above.
In any case, it goes beyond a list of checkpoints like that. The fact remains that, at this stage of history, FreeMarker is actively developed and maintained and Velocity is not.
But then again, e.g. my code does 95% of its job in java and uses templates mainly to call tools and build layouts.
After all, the authors of the various frameworks that now support FM are present off-and-on in our community: The "Open for Business" people (Dave and Andy), Anthony Eden (Jpublish), the Tammi guy, Ikka Priha. We never had any contact of any sort with the Turbine people. If they had been making any attempt to use our newer stuff, we surely would have heard from one or more of them.
As stated above. We will move to a more component based approach with post-2.3 and supporting "yet another templating solution" is pretty low on our list. If you have patches, send them. If there is demand from users, tell us.
Henning, I don't see a delicate way of breaking this to you, so here goes: I personally will not lift so much as my little finger to provide FM support within Turbine. If other FreeMarker developers want to do so that's fine, but I personally will not. Here is why:
First of all, I think it's your job.
Second of all, anybody who likes FreeMarker now has a significant choice of web app frameworks that integrate quite well with FM. There is Open for Business ( http://ofbiz.org ), Jpublish ( http://jpublish.org ), Tammi ( http:// tammi.sourceforge.net/ ) which seems to be quite similar in design to Turbine. There is Niggle ( http://niggle.org ) the skeletal web app framework I wrote, and we also have working examples of using FreeMarker with Struts.
And the other reason that I don't see much reason to cross the road to support (to paraphrase you) "yet another web app framework" is that, as things stand, I think Turbine clearly gets more value-added from FM integration than vice versa. Velocity, the only templating engine that you are currently making available to Turbine users, is not being actively developed or maintained. Patches are never reviewed. No code to speak of has been committed for the past year. The project is really in quite a disastrous state.
FreeMarker is actively developed and maintained. When bugs are reported, they are fixed quite fast. You can verify this from looking at our list archives. You can also verify that bug reports against Velocity are consistently ignored by looking at the archives of this very list.
Unless the Velocity community gets its act together, it is a worrisome situation for anybody with a framework or other kind of software that relies on that tool. By the same token, it is worrisome for anybody looking seriously at Turbine. You should move towards supporting other template engines for the good of your project. So, it is my view that there is no reason for us to do the integration work when you get a big gain and we get relatively little. Moreover, there is an underlying problem at this point in the history. I would not take the time to contribute a patch for Turbine/FM integration, when I think there is some chance that it will be rejected or that FM support will be removed at some later point, for completely arbitrary, non-technical reasons. I don't like to waste my time.
So, under the circumstances, it seems fanciful to me to think that I am going to submit any patches for FM support within Turbine. You may think I'm being hostile, but at this point, the facts do speak for themselves. The logic and structure of the situation is such that we're not likely to do this work.
Regards,
Jonathan Revusky -- lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/ FreeMarker-Velocity comparison page: http://freemarker.org/fmVsVel.html FreeMarker 2.3pre4 is out!
Regards Henning
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