freemarker-announce — [RETIRED without substitute] Announcements of new releases and FM-related tools.

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker 2.3 preview is available for download

[Jonathan R. <jo...@re...>]

Friends,

The first preview release of FreeMarker 2.3 is available for download at
the usual places.

This release introduces some powerful new features to support XML
processing/transformation, i.e. the new visit/recurse directives along
with the TemplateNodeModel interface. The freemarker.ext.dom package was
introduced to provide default TemplateNodeModel wrappers for the W3C
DOM.

This release also adds the ability to define functions with return
values via the function directive. Support for variable interpolations
within string literals was also added.

The default object wrapping implementation was changed. By default, if
the object passed in is not one of the basic java objects, such as
String, Number, List, or Map, that have obvious wrappings, then it
defaults to the BeansWrapper behavior, except when the object is an
instance of PyObject, in which case, the JythonWrapper is used. Or if
the object is an instance of org.w3c.dom.Node, then the new
freemarker.ext.dom wrapper is used.

Enjoy. All feedback is extremely welcome.

Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker 2.2.2 available

[Attila S. <sze...@fr...>]

Dear all,

I'm pleased to announce that FreeMarker 2.2.2 is now available for download
from www.freemarker.org.
FreeMarker 2.2.2 is a minor bugfix release compared to 2.2.1. The only
changes are:
- fixed the _text key of the freemarker.ext.xml.NodeListModel used with W3C
DOM trees
- the distribution is compiled against JDK 1.2.2 classes, so it is readily
usable on JDK 1.2.2 based systems.

Attila Szegedi
FreeMarker co-admin

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker 2.2.1 available

[Jonathan R. <jo...@re...>]

Hi all.

FreeMarker 2.2.1 is available in the usual places. The main thing it has
going for it is that the time/date support was re-introduced. Also,
there is the auto-import/auto-include feature. Also, the API of
f.t.Template was refactored a bit so that you can get at the Environment
object before and after the processing, which can be convenient in some
cases. 

I do not think there are any backward compatibility issues with FM 2.2.

Here is a direct download link:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freemarker/freemarker-2.2.1.tar.gz

Enjoy,

Jonathan Revusky

[FreeMarker-announce] Re: [Freemarker-devel] FreeMarker 2.2 final is available.

[Jonathan R. <jo...@re...>]

On Thursday, March 27, 2003, at 02:46 AM, Jonathan Revusky wrote:

> Friends,
>
> I just put up a 2.2 labelled final. Here is an instant gratification
> download link:
>
> http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freemarker/freemarker-2.2.tar.g

It was probably obvious, but the above instant gratification link is 
missing a 'z' at the end, it should be:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freemarker/freemarker-2.2.tar.gz

JR

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker 2.2 final is available.

[Jonathan R. <jo...@re...>]

Friends,

I just put up a 2.2 labelled final. Here is an instant gratification
download link:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freemarker/freemarker-2.2.tar.g

The pure truth of the matter is that there is only very little
difference between the last release, 2.2 RC2 and this one. We basically
nailed a couple of nth order bugs that almost nobody would run into
anyway.

But it's still a milestone. 2.2 is now the approved, production-quality
version of FreeMarker and that means that all the new stuff, like
name-spaces, JSP taglib support, macros with nested bodies, whitespace
stripping, all that stuff, is no longer experimental. They're features
that are part of the stable release.

No time/date yet, but we (at least I) was close to putting it back. It
will probably be in a 2.2.1 released fairly soon.

Enjoy,

Jonathan Revusky

[FreeMarker-announce] Emacs syntax highlight available

[Daniel D. <dd...@fr...>]

Thanks to Marvin Greenberg, an FTL syntax highlight file for Emacs is
available on:

http://freemarker.org/editors.html

Anybody can help to improve it is welcome!

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany

[FreeMarker-announce] Re: [Freemarker-devel] FreeMarker 2.2 release candidate 2 available.

[Daniel D. <dd...@fr...>]

Wednesday, March 12, 2003, 2:53:36 AM, Jonathan Revusky wrote:

> Friends,
>
> The second release candidate of FreeMarker 2.2 is available. Here is a  
> direct download link:
[snip]
> The only new feature that comes to mind is the ability to use the
> <#assign..> directive to capture a block of a template
[snip]

Because you did that last... :) I guess these are probably more
important new features that should be mentioned:

- boolean formatting, as someBool?string("yes", "no")
- we have pluggable template storage (cache storage)
- FreemarkerServlet:
  . You can specify the output charset in FreemarkerServlet
  . Supports all Congfig. settings
- string literals can be alternatively quoted with apostrophe-quote
- we have couple of new built-ins, such ?starts_with, ?replace,
  ?sort_by... etc.

> Note that LooseObjectWrapper is gone. That wasn't well thought out. The
[snip]

It is missing from the version history, because this was a last minute
change you did. Please be kind to add these last-minute changes to the
version history yourself in the future before you do the release.

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker 2.2 release candidate 2 available.

[Jonathan R. <jo...@re...>]

Friends,

The second release candidate of FreeMarker 2.2 is available. Here is a  
direct download link:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freemarker/freemarker- 
2.2rc2.tar.gz?download

The changes between this and the first release candidate are not so  
major. Some bugs were fixed but they were pretty minor because, really,  
it seems like RC1 was pretty solid. There were some little  
whitespace-related fixes, we got rid of some glitches in the template  
caching machinery.  There was a bad performance bug in terms of  
concatenating a lot of strings together in a single expression and that  
was fixed.

The only new feature that comes to mind is the ability to use the  
<#assign..> directive to capture a block of a template (potentially  
containing other instructions and so on) as a variable, so you can go:

<#assign x>blah blah ${foo} <@bar /></#assign>

and it assigns the captured output from the block as x. You can also  
use the local and global directives in an analogous way if you want the  
variable to be local or global.

Note that LooseObjectWrapper is gone. That wasn't well thought out. The  
way to be more liberal about null values is by hooking into the  
TemplateExceptionHandler machinery.

A big thank you to everybody who helped on this.

Enjoy,

Jonathan Revusky

[FreeMarker-announce] FMPP 0.8.0b is out

[Daniel D. <dd...@fr...>]

FMPP is a general-purpose text preprocessor tool that uses FreeMarker
templates. It is especially designed for HTML preprocessor, for the
generation of complete (static) homepages: directory structure that
contains HTML-s, image files, etc. But of course it can be used to
generate source code or whatever text files. FMPP is extendable with
Java classes to pull data from any data sources (XML file, database,
etc.) and embed the data into the generated files.

FMPP can be used with UN*X-style command-line interface, or as Ant task,
or you can embed it into your Java application.

More information:
http://fmpp.sourceforge.net/index.html

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany

[FreeMarker-announce] New Niggle release available (1.1pre15)

[Jonathan R. <jo...@re...>]

Folks,

I thought I should mention that there is a new release available of the N=
iggle=20
Web Application Framework. Mostly, this is a long-long-overdue release to=
=20
synch up with the new FreeMarker. The last Niggle release included FreeMa=
rker=20
2.1pre1 or something, which actually had some significant bugs. This one=20
includes 2.2rc1.

One new feature that will probably be very appealing to some people is th=
at=20
you can optionally write your controller code (XXXServletInteraction clas=
s)=20
in Python instead of Java. This is actually a felicitous side-effect of t=
he=20
jython-integration work that Attila has done. I have converted over the 3=
=20
tutorial examples to jython and they work okay. They are in the pytut=20
directory.=20

The feature is still experimental (and I am interested in feedback) but w=
hat=20
this basically means is that you can write a pretty full-featured MVC jav=
a=20
servlet application without actually writing any java code. This is maybe=
=20
akin to aikido, a martial art somehow based on fighting without actually=20
fighting. Or tantric sex, which is sex which involves not actually.....=20
(Well, never mind...)

Anyway, for people who aren't familiar with it, what Niggle provides over=
 and=20
above raw FreeMarker is mostly data persistence and validation. It allows=
 you=20
to write robust, maintainable servlet apps with surprisingly little code.

http://niggle.org

Enjoy,

Jonathan

=20

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker 2.2rc1 is available.

[Jonathan R. <jre...@te...>]

Folks,

It's my pleasure to announce that the first FreeMarker 2.2 release 
candidate is available at the usual places.

For those who don't yet know it, FreeMarker 2.2 adds some very powerful 
new features, such as far more powerful macros, namespaces, and support 
for the use of 3rd party JSP taglibs.

I would strongly encourage everybody to give this a try. Unlike the 
move from 2.0->2.1, the transitional pain is minimal, and you won't be 
looking back!

Enjoy!

Jonathan Revusky

[FreeMarker-announce] ANN: Availability of the Eclipse plugin

[Attila S. <sze...@fr...>]

Dear all,

an alpha version of the FreeMarker plugin for Eclipse is now available. To
install it in your copy of Eclipse, do the following:
1. Open the Window menu, then Open Perspective -> Install/Update
2. Click with the right mouse button on the "Feature Updates" view, then
select New->Site Bookmark
3. In the displayed dialog box, type "FreeMarker" for "Name" and
"http://www.freemarker.org/eclipse/update" for URL. Leave the "Bookmark
type" radio buttons on "Eclipse update site".
4. Click "Finish"
5. Open the tree node under the newly created update site named
"FreeMarker", select the "FreeMarker 0.1.0" feature, and install it using
the "Install now" button in the preview pane.

From now on, you have syntax highlight, syntax error reporting, and outline
view for .ftl files. Note that this plugin is still in very early stage, and
we'll probably improve it in the future - i.e. add autocomplete features.

Many thanks to Stephan Müller for coding this plugin.

Attila.

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker 2.1.5 is out

[Attila S. <sze...@fr...>]

Dear all,

I'm pleased to announce that we have just released FreeMarker 2.1.5, a
release that fixes few bugs present in FreeMarker versions up to 2.1.4.

The list of bugfixes can be read on:
http://www.freemarker.org/docs/versions_2_1_5.html

Best Regards,
  Attila Szegedi.

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker 2.2 pre2 available.

[Jonathan R. <jre...@te...>]

Greetings,

FreeMarker 2.2 preview 2 is now available for download at the usual 
place. Here is an instant gratification link:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freemarker/freemarker-2.2pre2.tar.gz

Various issues have been fixed. The new whitespace trimming directives 
that give you fine control over whitespace output now work and are 
documented. You can define "body variables" which are variables local 
to the body of a macro invocation. Various bugs have been fixed.

I would encourage everybody to give this a try. No need to be too 
nervous. It's still labeled a preview, but the code is really in pretty 
good shape, I'd say, and now I don't anticipate really big changes 
between this and the 2.2 final. I think it's more or less beaten into 
shape now.

Thanks to everybody who helped make this possible.

Good night from Europe,

Jonathan

[FreeMarker-announce] 2.2pre1 is out

[Attila S. <sze...@fr...>]

Dear all,

I'm pleased to announce that the first preview release of the upcoming
FreeMarker 2.2 version is now available for download on
http://freemarker.sourceforge.net

The new features are just too numerous to be mentioned here. You will find a
comprehensive list of changes in the online viewable manual.

Thanks to all members of the community for making this possible.

Cheers,

Attila Szegedi
FreeMarker co-admin

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker edit mode for JEdit editor

[Jonathan R. <jo...@re...>]

Folks,

The latest release of JEdit, 4.1pre7, includes an edit mode for
freemarker templates, that syntax-highlights freemarker directives. By
default, it's associated with the .ftl extension, though that can be
configured in the global options.

Unfortunately, it isn't my absolutely latest version (my fault, I didn't
send it to Slava in time) which supports the new unified macro/transform
syntax that will be in 2.2. Though, I just sent Slava that file, so it
should be in the next Jedit release. I actually don't know whether the
next release is pre8 or 4.1final. From what I can tell, 4.1final is
quite close.

For those who don't know it, JEdit is very fine programmer's editor. It
is open source and cross-platform, written in Java. The most appealing
aspect of Jedit is its extensibility. It has a plugin API and many
plugins written for it. A plugin for working with FreeMarker templates
is under development, in fact. If you are in the market for a powerful
cross-platform programmer's editor and could never quite feel
comfortable with emacs or vi (hey, don't blame yourself) you could do a
lot worse than Jedit. Definitely worth a try.

The only real caveat wrt JEdit is that, like big swing apps, it is a bit
of a pig -- though nothing like netbeans or jbuilder or things like
that, which are in an entirely different league bloat-wise... but if you
are heavily CPU and Memory-constrained, it may not be a good choice. But
if you have anything like current hardware (last 2 years or so) there is
really no problem. 

Happy New Year,

Jonathan Revusky

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker 2.1.4 is out

[Attila S. <sze...@fr...>]

Dear all,

FreeMarker 2.1.4 was released today. It is a purely bugfix release that
addresses two issues:
- Log4J is now discovered during the automatical log library lookup
- FreeMarker now operates correctly even when the java process it runs in
has no read access to the directory specified in the "user.dir" system
property (some hosting companies configure their servers this way and people
had problems using FreeMarker in their webapps on these servers)

Cheers,
  Szegedi Attila.

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker 2.1.3 is out

[Attila S. <sze...@fr...>]

Dear all,

I'm pleased to announce that a new (bugfix-only) release of FreeMarker,
2.1.3 is now out and available for download.

Changes between 2.1.2 and 2.1.3 are admittedly quite minor, but we encourage
anyone using 2.1.2 to upgrade to 2.1.3 to avoid stumbling across any of
those few bugs that we fixed.

Cheers,
  Attila.

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker 2.1.2 is out

[Attila S. <sze...@fr...>]

Dear all,

I'm pleased to announce that a new (mostly bugfix) release of FreeMarker,
2.1.2 is now out and available for download.

Changes between 2.1.1 and 2.1.2 are admittedly quite minor, but we encourage
anyone using 2.1.1 to upgrade to 2.1.2 to avoid stumbling across any of
those few bugs that we fixed.

Cheers,
  Attila.

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker 2.1 available.

[Jonathan R. <jo...@re...>]

Friends,

It is a source of great satisfaction to announce our first  release of=20
Freemarker 2.1 that is labelled production/stable.

If you don't care to read all the text below, here's a link to the downlo=
ad=20
page.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3D794

Anyway, in this release, we have achieved a good balance of goals. The to=
ol is=20
both more powerful and has been made easier to use.

Life is made easier for newbies and casual users since, unlike in prior=20
versions of FreeMarker, you can use use standard java.util.* collections=20
directly rather than explicitly wrapping them in TemplateModels.=20

However, for advanced users, there are a lot of more degrees of freedom t=
o=20
cutomize the tool.

An advanced programmer can write a custom ObjectWrapper implementation if=
 he=20
wants very fine control of the semantics of exposing objects to a templat=
e.=20
Also, he can write a custom TemplateExceptionHandler which gets a chance =
to=20
deal with events within the engine, such as an invalid reference or other=
=20
type of error condition.

Among other things, this version also introduces support for using FreeMa=
rker=20
from jython and also exposing time/date objects to the template -- where=20

There are plenty of other things. Let's see...

Support for using FreeMarker from jython. Examples provided.

More flexible localized formatting for numbers.

Support for exposing time/date objects to the template -- the aforementio=
ned=20
localization machinery kicks in and provides the correct localized displa=
y.

We have local variables in functions. We have a more powerful transformat=
ion=20
API with a <flush> directive. Some extra useful transformations have been=
=20
incorporated, such as capture_output and interpret.

Anyway, enjoy.=20

Best Regards,

Jonathan Revusky

[FreeMarker-announce] FreeMarker 2.1pre3 available

[Jonathan R. <jre...@te...>]

Folks,

I'm pleased to announce that FreeMarker 2.1pre3 is available at the usual 
places.

This version does contain a fairly significant bugfix -- the bug reported by 
Chris Nokleberg, where local variables would disappear from a function's 
context, after returning from a nested function call. Probably few people ran 
into the bug so far, since local variables in functions were only introduced 
in 2.1pre1. But we have a regression test for that bug, so it's not coming 
back...

Also, there is some initial support for using jython to write FreeMarker 
servlets. This must still be considered experimental really, and we'll be 
polishing this up over the next while.

Boolean semantics changed (again). In this version, the default scalar and 
container implementations will not be interpreted as booleans in the 
appropriate context based on their being empty. Unless you are using the 
classic compatibility mode, you have to use the builtins ?exists, ?if_exists, 
or ?has_content as the case requires. 

I think this transition will bug many people at first, but then grow on them, 
since really does introduce a clarity to the semantics that were missing in 
previous versions.

Well, nothing more to report at the moment.

This is a 9/11 release, I just noticed. That wasn't planned. Don't read 
anything into it. 

In related matters, apparently (or so the media claim) people are afraid to 
get on airplanes today because they fear a terrorist attack. IOW, they 
consider it likely that Bin Laden and co. intend to pull the exact same stunt 
on the exact same calendar date. I guess, just for the sake of 
predictability... <shrug>

Of course, it is true that they (Qaeda) could be superstitious and have 
decided that 9/11 is a very lucky day (from their POV). However, if they 
wanted to do it on the same date for superstitious reasons, would they use 
the Gregorian calendar? Would they not use the Islamic calendar -- the 
one that determines when their various religious holidays like Ramadan occur? 
(In that case, I figure that, since that calendar is lunar, the exact same 
combination of day and month is most likely a different day, like +/-
day or two at least...)

Well, on that thought, I'd better run out and get a beer....

Cheers,

Jonathan

[FreeMarker-announce] 2.1pre1 available.

[Jonathan R. <jre...@te...>]

Folks,

A preview release of FreeMarker 2.1 is available.

Here's an instant gratification download link:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freemarker/freemarker2_1pre1.tar.gz

2.1 is pretty cool. Let's see... it's got local variables in functions. 
There's the new Configuration object so that you can put default variables in 
there and they're visible from any template. There's the newer, more powerful 
TemplateTransformModel API. There's the fact that object wrapping takes place 
behind the scenes and you can simply pass in HashMap or Hashtable to the 
Template.process() method and it wraps things as TemplateModels behind the 
scenes.

Attila has put in the ability to configure which methods get exposed via 
reflection, so that you can veto the dangerous or inappropriate ones from 
being called from FTL.

Though this is classified as a preview release, it's pretty robust. It passes 
all 28 of our unit tests anyway. Certainly, if you're just starting to 
develop using FreeMarker, you should probably switch to 2.1 since you might 
as well get used to the newer API sooner rather than later.

The new, cooler documentation that Daniel and Keith have been working on will 
be incorporated into the 2.1pre2 that we should have out at some point next 
week.

For people using the Niggle/FreeMarker combination, I'll probably have a new 
Niggle release in the next day or so that synchs up with this FM release. 

Enjoy, 

Jonathan