Re: [Freemarker-devel] Freemarker marketing?
Generates text that depends on changing data (like dynamic HTML).
Brought to you by:
revusky
From: Bill L. <bil...@gm...> - 2005-06-21 22:42:18
|
> May I also ask, what do you miss from FreeMarker compared to Velocity > and JSP? What are the advantages of those technologies over FreeMarker > in your opinion? What do I miss from Velocity? Nothing really. I only used it for a few months before really looking into FM so I wasn't an expert Vel user. As for JSP.. oh man. We develop webapps which people install on all kinds of appservers and we routinely run into all kinds of problems: * "Compiled method size exceeds limit" * Parse errors (we found one that didn't like this: <%=3D (foo ? "bar" : "b= az") %> * Content type / character encoding issues. * Implicit variables (for example, ATG has a private "factory" method in their JSP's which interfered with some of our pages). Besides that there are many inherint drawbacks to JSP: * No macro support (ie, hard to reuse chunks of common HTML code). Dynamic and static includes have their drawabacks. * It's Java so things like inner classes, methods, threads, etc can creep i= n. * Error/compiler messages suck. * We can't distribute a common pre-compiled version of our JSP pages which will run on all appservers. :( I guess the one thing I "miss" from JSP is how ubiquitous it is. So, I think better tool support for FM would help a lot. > Sure. The question is, who will fill them with content? Anybody likes to > write FreeMarker blogs? (: I guess build it and they will come. :) We'll just need to make sure the releases are announced well and people will blog about it. > > This is basically the experience the developer has when they first > > download & use the app. Right now, you can't even do an "ant jar" > > without having a bunch of dependencies first. :( >=20 > I'm afraid there is nothing can be done about this. We must have > dependencies, as we support Servlet, Jython, whatever XML stuff, Rhino, > etc, and we can't pack those together with the distro. Anyway why would > anybody want to do "ant jar"... the freemarker.jar is already there. If > somebody wants, then probably he wants to "hack" something (a very small > minority), and that of course have a not too low entry bar. Why can't you put those in the distro? There are ~2^7 Java OS projects out there that distribute servlet.jar, xml stuff and probably Rhino too (I'm not sure about jython). Besides, you could always hook the build up to ibiblio.org and download those dependencies at compile time. How about I take a stab at the build file this weekend and show you what I mean? > > It mostly keeps users coming back to the site and makes the project > > feel active. C'mon, how many times do you get bored and surf OS sites > > (I do!).. I leave in 2 seconds if nothings's been updated which is a > > shame. >=20 > Try not take it as offending, but I think it's some kind of modern > mental sickness of people. Maybe they see "New!" too much in the mall > and in the adds, or hear to much that the speed of the increasing of GDP > was not increased this year, and that's bad (what a absurd thing... > should it grow up to the infinity?). They believe that if something is > still, then it is dead and rotting... Some of them maybe don't even look > into your project if its page was not updated in the last 1 month. It's > like I have told on the FMPP page that I don't actively develop it, just > maintain it. Then many people afraid to use that, and instead tries to > find some "active" project which is years behind FMPP (since projects > are usually incredibly slow in realizing otherwise trivial things), and > maybe will not ever reach it. Also they forgot that the end-user product > where they use that "dead" project will really gone after a few years, > so not choosing something that is currently the best doesn't make sense. Well, whatever, I'm just telling you what I know to be true -- users like a little activity on the front page and it'd be simple to add. This can be a long term thing and don't worry, I don't want to nuke the front page as-is. Check out what we did on jivesoftware.org: http://www.jivesoftware.org/ Very simple: news, downloads, forum posts, etc. I'm not saying the FM page has to look like this but there are a few things you can do to keep it interesting for prospective developers. > >> I have started that on the sf.net project page. Yes, that's not really > >> visible for users. But the point is, it was no used be the developer > >> either. Mostly I was the only one who has used that, with the hope tha= t > >> other developers start using that, but they didn't. > > > > Cool -- glad to know there's something going. >=20 > What's cool? I meant, years ago I did, then it turn out that it was not > working in reality. Nobody have used it. Ok, I misunderstood. I still think it'd be useful to publish this somewhere.. it can be a long term thing. > > How about the changelog? >=20 > We have one... the version history in the Manual. Ah, ok, good. I'd suggest a pointer to that in the readme. > > The build file can be easily modified to make it so you only need one > > freemarker.jar. I'm happy to do this. >=20 > But then the examples are not pre-built. And "ant examples" will fully > build the examples even now. True, you will need to set servlet > dependency. That's what you would like to eliminate, right? Yeah, I want to eliminate the dependency *errors*, not the dependencies themselves. :) Cheers, --Bill |