Tuesday, June 17, 2003, 2:07:54 AM, Henning P. Schmiedehausen wrote:
[snip]
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.
So what? When the available tools fulfil the needs of 100% of the users, there is no point in supporting another tool which will not be used.
[snip]
If somebody believes that Velocity fulfills the needs of 100% of the users (or at least that the other template engine (FM) can't be better for many users), and this is why it is the template engine used by almost all Turbine users, then he is either naive or intentionally distorts facts. The reason is that Jakarta projects tend to use other Jakarta projects, for strategic reasons. Also, users of Jakarta projects tend to run into other Jakarta projects when they are looking for solution for something, so they will use the Jakarta solution, and often will not seriously look after other alternatives (anyway, users give more credit to ASF projects, that to the projects of NeverHeradIt.org). Now, I do *not* intend to upbraid anybody because of this mechanism, nor I cry because it is "undemocratic"; this is how Jakarta works for its own interest. I just would like to ask not to pretend that this is not works like this, and tell that the reason of not supporting FM is that users don't need its features... I do *not* complain because FM is not supported, just don't tell false reasonings.
Yes, it does seem that there is an attempt to frame this discussion in a rather tricky, deceptive way. For example, take this very question of whether there is any end-user demand for FreeMarker support.
Well, is this even a proper way of framing the question? As a matter of fact, most people do not specifically want to use FM or Vel or anything else *per se*. What they want is to *solve problems*. And they may not be aware that FreeMarker already solves whatever problem. Somebody is much more likely to request decimal number support in Velocity (which they frequently do in fact) than they are to request to Turbine developers that FM be supported. I suspect also that most of the Turbine users are very much in the "Jakarta/ASF orbit" and only relatively few of them will even know that FreeMarker exists, much less that it supports decimal numbers and other things they need.
Meanwhile, it is very clear, just from my lurking on Velocity lists, that Velocity does not come anywhere close to fulfilling the needs of 100% of users. It is quite clear that there is very significant demand in the Velocity camp for features that are present in FM but not present in Vel -- things like support for decimal numbers continually come up. Many users would like macros to have some ability to have local variables. The block HTML-escaping kind of stuff introduced in FM 2.1 is something that Velocity users are constantly requesting, as well as the fine control over whitespace output. And these things are still just off the top of my head. There are many more examples.
If FreeMarker and Velocity were presented side-by-side on an equal footing to Turbine users -- with the latest versions of each tool supported, and * of course* no javadoc comments telling people not to use FM -- it would actually come as quite a surprise to me if many of them did not opt for FM over Vel once they realized that FM supports these various things. Moreover, once you realize that, not only does Velocity not support these things, but that Velocity development has come to a halt, and thus, Velocity, as far as one can tell, will *never* support these things, then the choice becomes all the more clear.
The argument that FM support is of such little interest to Turbine users does not strike me as being based on anything that resembles a fair-minded objective evaluation of the question.
(Also, that when we point out the fallacies in Henning's argumentation, he resorts to ad-hominem, one naturally tends to become quite distrustful of the good faith of people in that camp.)
Regards,
Jonathan Revusky -- lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/ FreeMarker-Velocity comparison page, http://freemarker.org/fmVsVel.html FreeMarker 2.3pre4 is out!
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