I know I shouldn't respond to this, I really shouldn't. Especially on
the developers list. As far as I'm concerned this project is active and
always has been. I started using Velocity to make some high-value
high-pressure internal apps about a year ago. The project was such a
success, I got it all done before vacation and didn't receive a single
complaint while on vacation. Everyone was so impressed, we've since
switched over to using Velocity for all of our internal projects, and
even the old cranky JSP die-hards love it. And, our UI people are more
confident and productive.
Every time I have had a question, I've gotten a response within a few
hours. Every time I've had a bug or problem, I've gotten a work around
in the same time frame, and a fix usually not too long thereafter. For
everything else I've wanted to do with it, I've done it myself.
Velocity doesn't have all sorts of unnecessary crap in it which makes it
really easy for me to do what I want with it.
The whiners that claim Velocity needs more bells and whistles are the
same whiners who would post to the user list complaining they don't know
how to use said bells and whistles. Simplicity is king in this business
and that makes Velocity one of my favorite codebases to work with.
I'm not claiming Velocity is scalable and production ready and that I'd
use it to serve massive public-facing websites. It'll get there, maybe,
but quite frankly we should all not lose site of the fact that Velocity
is a *template language*, not a web application framework. Web
application frameworks are ugly, hairy, and commonly very customized.
Meanwhile there is still a great need for a general purpose template
language; Velocity fits this bill nicely.
And like I said before, for low-bandwith internal webapps, man, is it nice.
--jason
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
Will Glass-Husain wrote:
Ah, hi Jonathan how are you?
Fine, thanks.
I think we discussed this issue extensively last time Jonathan was on
the
last a couple of years ago.
<shrug>
Update me. Did anything happen since then?
Perhaps I might suggest the rest of the
Velocity community just refuse to be baited and stick to the topic at
hand?
(basically, ignore the temptation to have the last word).
As I remember, the topic was how new community members can help out.
Well, you should also help them (which would help them to help you) by
telling the truth, fostering a culture of brutal honesty. You people
simply have no right to mislead people like this. Somebody reading
archives of this list, trying to make a technically based decision
about whether to use Velocity or an alternative, or whether to try to
get involved, say, has the right to know what the actual status of the
project is -- and the other things he's comparing it with.
People should not be telling lies about this kind of thing. When
Henning claimed, in the message I responded to, that the project never
was/is dead, and that the lack of activity was due to the developers'
pickiness, he was not telling the truth by any stretch of the
imagination.
And if that is not a serious matter, it darned well should be. Also,
you have some complicity in it, frankly, because you know darned well
that his post was not truthful. You want to change the subject to JR
when the subject is really that Henning's post was not truthful. This
does not really speak well of you.
That sounds very very harsh, I suppose, Will, but, in a way, I
sympathize with you. You sincerely want to re-activate the project.
What you don't realize is that if you want to have high quality
development occur, you have to foment a culture of brutal honesty. You
want to re-activate development, but in some "nice" way where you
spend an inordinate time being a kind of mutual admiration club,
stroking one another's egos. The cold hard reality IMO is that the two
things are mutually incompatible and your attempts to re-activate the
project on that basis will lead you to nothing but misery and
frustration. (You do have a high threshold for misery and frustration,
I suppose. I observed that while they jerked you around on the decimal
number issue for 2 years or more.)
In any case, I really feel that it is unethical to be trying to
mislead people about the state of the project. The guy who mentioned
that the project was "dead" and got contradicted spent several months
presumably getting a Velocity-based prototype working. Now, he hit a
bug and discovers that the project is not really being actively
maintained. Now, I can only speculate, but if he knew from the get-go
that the project was not being actively maintained, he might not have
made that investment. Misleading people about the state of the various
software projects can cause people to waste a lot of their valuable
professional time.
Henning has no right to be trying to mislead people about the actual
state of the project. That's unethical and unprofessional.
Jonathan Revusky
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