Hi everyone, Just looking over the various classes in the org.apache.wookie.helpers package I was wondering if we should be replacing the various methods like "toXml()" and "toJSON() in WidgetHelper, WidgetInstanceHelper (etc) with a templating engine to generate the various representations of classes we expose in the API.
Looking over the API we have 6 classes to represent using XML, and also potentially in JSON and Atom (at least in the case of Widget), so around 13 templates. I've had a brief look at a few OSS templating engines: Apache Velocity (http://velocity.apache.org/) Tea (http://teatrove.sourceforge.net/) FreeMarker (http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/) There is a list of others here: http://java-source.net/open-source/template-engines I think the "pros" for using templating engines are: - templating languages are easier to work with than Java code, - implementers can edit templates directly without touching the source (e.g. to remove or include properties, or use different markup, etc.) - formatting code is removed from the java source (no more clumsy string building) The "cons" are: - it adds more dependencies - it will take effort to do What do you think? Any experience in using these? Do you think its worth the effort? S
