I'm excited to report that the development site for Sun's JavaCC parser generator is now being served up via Velocity templates (by way of CollabNet's SourceCast)!
Daniel,
I don't begrudge you the self-congratulatory tone of the announcement. I know that it is very gratifying when other people use your work. On the other hand, one infers an undue level of complacency in your camp. If I were someone with a significant investment in Velocity, I would find this kind of unsettling. The fact remains that no Velocity development to speak of has occurred for about a year. You, Daniel, are the last guy to have committed any code to the core project. And that was still 7 months ago. But actually, I would say that, to all intents and purposes, Velocity develoment came to a standstill at least a year ago.
Now, software technology moves fairly quickly. A year is a very long time. For example, I can tell you that the competing project that is largely my fault (;-)) FreeMarker, has improved dramatically over the last year or so. We are now in our 4th major release cycle of the last 16 months, and each such cycle has added major new features. Come to think of it, I wonder: what was the last significant feature added to Velocity and when was it added?
Now, certainly, Velocity, due to being a jakarta project, has very good placement, and gets a lot of usage out there. It certainly has a huge marketing/placement advantage over FreeMarker. It is likely that Velocity will continue to have more users than FreeMarker despite FreeMarker's cutting edge features.
But then look at JSP. The situation there is night and day. JSP has a huge placement advantage over Velocity and JSP has been improving a lot too. There is JSTL and Java server faces, and now a whole bunch of 3rd party JSP taglibs are making their appearance -- things like CeWolf and SiteMesh and so on -- functionality that JSP users can draw on and are not available if you use Velocity. (They are available from FreeMarker since we added taglib support, BTW.)
So, it does not make sense to me that you guys are sitting on your laurels like this. And certainly, it seems to me quite subjectively that traffic on this list (I mean velocity-user) is not what it used to be...
So, while I don't begrudge you the self-congratulatory notes when you see a high-profile website using Velocity, I actually think that some apocalyptic gloom-and-doom sorts of posts would be more appropriate objectively. At least if they served to rally the troops. Complacency does not seem to be indicated. Not in this sector -- nosirrr.
Or really, cutting to the chase: Do you guys have any plans for future development of Velocity?
http://javacc.dev.java.net/
The happy irony is that Velocity is built on top of a JavaCC-generated parser. Gotta love that synergy.
Well, FreeMarker also uses a JavaCC-generated parser. I was quite interested to learn that JavaCC is now open-sourced. I learned of this from your post. Thank you for that.
Best Regards,
Jonathan Revusky -- lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/ FreeMarker 2.3pre4 is out!
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