Hi Peter,
I'll just weigh in with a quick comment or two as I'm working through
the weekend to deliver a big project next week. I may not be able to
respond later as my email access is limited.
We've discussed this on the list before. My take -- Velocity is a
mature product, with a released version in use lots of places. For 1.5
we focused on bug fixes (and improvements in error reporting,
integration, etc) and it's pretty stable. There's really no important
bugs left that haven't been solved-- Look at JIRA and look at the wiki
-- there's only a handful of trivial (if subtle) syntax bugs left.
(there's an irritating problem with including macros in parsed files
too, but it's arguable whether that's a bug or design issue).
User support is pretty good -- the lists have far more activity than a
classic "dormant" project. And developers are still around. (Myself,
Nathan, Henning are often present on the lists). The major frustration
continues to be release - understandably many users expect a released
version and we haven't delivered it in a timely manner. Regardless of
this fact, there's many users using version 1.4 and some using
pre-release 1.5. The software hasn't decayed, it's only gotten better.
I don't feel competitive. Everyone has to make their own decisions
about whether and how to use Velocity.
Like Nathan, I also feel bad about the lack of a release. A week of
work and it would be done. But when I have my entire year's salary
hanging onto the delivery of a consulting project in May and June, it's
hard to set that time aside. The other committers also have significant
work and family committments. (what's with all this family stuff,
anyway?) I'm reluctant to say anything about timing in public, since
I've been wrong before. But I'm betting that I'll have that week in the
summer - maybe when I go on vacation :-)
best,
WILL
Peter Harrison wrote:
Velocity continues to be one of the primary technologies I use, but
there are a few annoying bugs that have been "planned" for future
releases and never made.
The point is that without a tight release cycle a open source project
will stagnate. The primary problem I see is that any work done in
Velocity will not make a release version anytime soon. If I thought that
improvements would make it into a release I would have fixed them by now
in the original codebase.
There are two major "bugs" I know of:
1. Setting a value to Null is ignored. Yes, I know its in the docs, its
been discussed to death here, but has not seen a fix in years, eben
though its a consensus that this should not be the right behaviour.
.
2. Having a Null in the first object within a list will cause the method
cache to fail, and that column will have empty values for every column.
There is a nasty work around code in every view for these issues. I am
not a newbie, have used Velocity for years, and continue to believe it
is better than JSP. However, I would like to see active development, and
I am prepared to help so long as I know that the work will actually be
released.
I'm not being critical for its own sake - I believe in Velocity, and my
work depends on it. I would like to see it improved. I would like to
take part in that improvement. But I need to know that those who control
the process will release my work in a timely manner.
Regards,
Peter
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