Re: Velocity vs JSP vs FreeMarker

[Will Glass-Husain]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Actually, with the caching turned on serving Velocity pages is pretty fast. 
Many say faster than JSP, though I haven't personally run any benchmarks.  I 
agree though this isn't generally relevant in a typical webapp.

I'd note that another benefit of Velocity is that you can use it for any 
text processing (e.g. sending emails) while JSP is web only.

WILL
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Florin Vancea" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Velocity Users List" <velocity-user@jakarta.apache.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2005 10:28 PM
Subject: Re: Velocity vs JSP vs FreeMarker


And one more I did not see in the thread (or even elsewhere):
The developer's cycle is incredibly short with Velocity (at least in my
setup).
I used to do JSP and with the best setup I could figure, any change in JSP
source meant a server-side JSP recompile (good seconds lost in
modify-compile-run-check cycle).
With Velocity and auto-loading it's instant. And better yet, I can change
directly the source files in the CVS'ed source tree, since I'm having a
FileLoader hooked at development time in the loader chain.
It's incredibly comfortable: just change and immediately see the result. 
If
it's good - commit directly to CVS.

On production runtime speed: I was also concerned about the speed but I
found out that there are so many other speed-eating issues in a full-blown
webapp that the difference between rendering JSP and rendering Velocity
simply does not count.
Florin
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jian chen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Velocity Users List" <velocity-user@jakarta.apache.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2005 6:35 AM
Subject: Re: Velocity vs JSP vs FreeMarker


Hi, All,
I have quite some experience with JSP and Velocity. To say it short, I
think Velocity is THE way to go. Reasons below:
1) Velocity syntax is very easy to recognize in any html template.
Other templating systems like FreeMarker, makes it really hard to see
what is the artificial html and what is the real one.
2) Speed-wise, who cares if JSP is some millisecond faster or not.
Given any reasonable machine, Velocity is good enough.
3) Velocity is WAY much simpler than the JSP mess. To be honest, I
don't like Sun's approach to make things unnecessarily complicated,
such as the JSP tag lib crap.
To a java developer who never does Web development, Velocity is a lot
easier to pick up, while you need to read a lot in order to master the
JSP intricacies (again due to the fact Sun introduced lot of features
in JSP which only make developers clueless, JSF, JSTL, etc.)
4) Velocity engine itself also provides a very small footprint I think
compared to the full-blown JSP engine with all the "fancy" features
that might get used once in a blue moon.
5) There are much more benefits using Velocity than JSP which I don't
need to list here.
Overall, Velocity is small, simple and efficient. That is what I like it
best.
Jian
On Apr 6, 2005 8:26 AM, Edmund Urbani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Ryan Lea wrote:
> > Just wondering if anyone has used/tried/investigated all 3 of these 
> > as
> > views (from MVC) and has any opinions on them??
> >
> > As a bit of a site note as well, has anyone used them with WebWork??
> >
> > cheers
> >
> > Ryan Lea
> > Web Developer
> >
>
> I have got experience with JSP and Velocity (never used FreeMarker or
WebWork).
> I started with JSP a few years back, then I switched to Velocity and
> right now I am considering to go back to JSP for a new project.
>
> Both allow developers to stick to MVC and create nice, clean,
maintainable pages.
> Both allow developers to mess around.
>
> Velocity does have a nice syntax for simple things like iterations, 
> ifs,
sets
> and you can define macros, which can be very useful to let templates
share
> things. You need no Java code to do this, it's all built-in. You can 
> not
> include Java Code in your templates (that may be considered both - a
good and
> a bad thing). Velocity does unexpected things with null values, or
rather it does
> not do anything with them besides writing to the log.
>
> In comparison JSPs are faster (once they have been compiled) and they
will always
> be, because they do not rely on reflection/bean mechanisms. To me, the
fact
> that JSP is compiled to Java classes is its biggest advantage over
templating engines
> like Velocity, and the reason why I am considering switching back to 
> it.
> Compiling does inform you about many sorts of errors you can make EARLY
(build-time
> vs run-time). Also, because JSPs do get translated to Java Code, I can
use all kinds
> of Java development tools on them. Eg. I can take a look at the call
hierarchie
> of one of my methods and see which JSPs use that method (that advantage
can be
> eliminated by using <jsp:bean /> tags instead of simply calling
get-methods).
>
> Well, now that I have said that much in favor of JSP, I can already 
> feel
the wrath
> of the velocity community upon me - just kidding ;)
>
> I hope that someone will speak in favor of Velocity on this list 
> though!
>
> Cheers
>   Edmund
>
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