Re: [Freemarker-devel] Joining OpenSymphony?

[Patrick L. <pli...@gm...>]

OpenSymphony tries to distance itself in about every way from  
Jakarta. That includes forcing things upon people unless there is  
_really_ good reason. Typically, the only things we force are  
infrastructure related (certain build targets, website, forums, etc).  
We *never* force project direction.

That means that the project owners get to choose which modules to  
support. Generally all OpenSymphony projects have a common goal of  
providing a pluggable design, allowing developers to use many  
different alternatives. For example, SiteMesh supports JSP, Velocity,  
and FreeMarker templates. It is adding Tapestry support soon too.

WebWork also has multiple template support. We will always support  
Velocity, however at this point we won't recommend it. But we leave  
the option there for users.

The same goes for OSWorkflow: it has persistence options using JDBC,  
Open For Business' Entity Engine, Hibernate, XML, in-memory, and  
Castor (I think). We generally recommend JDBC, as it is the most  
tested, but all are supported through a common persistence interface.

I hope that helps you make your decision. At the end of the day,  
politics plays very little part. If a competitor to project some  
OpenSymphony project has a better offering, other projects will use  
that if they can't get the OpenSymphony project to be better. An  
example of that happening right now is WebWork adopting support for  
Spring, even though XWork has it's own IoC container.

Patrick

On Jun 29, 2005, at 3:24 PM, Jonathan Revusky wrote:

> Daniel Dekany wrote:
>
>> Wednesday, June 29, 2005, 4:37:15 PM, Patrick Lightbody wrote:
>> [snip]
>>
>>>> Well, I believe FreeMarker would definitely benefit from joining an
>>>> umbrella organization, and OpenSymphony seems like a good choice  
>>>> to  me, as the conditions are reasonable and realistic.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Good. Well, you guys let me know when you're ready to take the   
>>> conversation a bit further along. We love FreeMarker and would  
>>> be  thrilled to find a way to integrate you in to the community.
>>>
>> [snip]
>> I have looked at the OpenSymhony site for some info about the
>> goals/philosophy/strategy of the organization, but didn't find  
>> anything.
>> (Maybe I didn't searched it enough.) No, it most certainly can't  
>> be that
>> much against the thinking of FM developers that we wouldn't want  
>> to join
>> because of that... but I'm curious. Like, does OpenSymhony tries to
>> adopt best-of-the-breed or simply unique and cool projects, and  
>> tries to
>> convenience them to join? Or rather it pushes its own solutions no  
>> mater
>> what (i.e. a better concurrent alternative is silently considered as
>> enemy, whose value will be denied desperately)?
>>
>
> It seems to me that if FM were to become part of OpenSymphony,  
> there would be great synergy in making it the default view/ 
> templating component for all OpenSymphony projects. Given  
> FreeMarker's support for macro libraries, the idea of developing  
> some common macro libraries that are used throughout various OS  
> projects could be quite attractive. A big win for OS and for  
> FreeMarker, since one thing that has been very slow to emerge is a  
> 3rd party FM macro libraries. (This is partly alleviated by the  
> ability to use JSP taglibs, but the ability to use the taglibs  
> still has a me-too flavor to it...) It would be great if a body of  
> FreeMarker macro libraries emerged, and that, often, you had things  
> you could do with FreeMarker via those macro libraries, that was  
> not readily available in JSP (and certainly not Velocity.)
>
> But to address what I think Daniel is getting at, the above (I mean  
> full adoption of FM as the templating default by OS projects, at  
> least where it makes sense) would have to happen because people  
> have determined that FM is the best available java templating tool.  
> And it wouldn't be a question of forcing it down anybody's throat  
> either.
>
> Meanwhile, the Jakarta people are certainly quite capable of  
> promoting something simply because it is a Jakarta project,  
> independently of its quality compared to other things in the same  
> space. The Turbine framework certainly does not use Velocity as its  
> default UI because they went and looked at competing template  
> engines and decided that Velocity was best. These guys even went so  
> far as to remove all FreeMarker (and WebMacro) support  from  
> Turbine (leaving Velocity as the only supported template engine) at  
> a point in time (early 2003) when Velocity was horribly inferior to  
> FreeMarker. (Well, of course, it still is horribly inferior.)
>
> By the way, when I suggested on a forum that the above was not a  
> technically based decision, but rather a political one, one of the  
> Turbine guys, one Henning Schmiedehausen, said that they removed  
> support for other template engines because nobody was using them.  
> Of course, the fact that their docs said explicitly "Use Velocity"  
> had nothing to do with this, I suppose. :_) You know, he made it  
> sound as if the various options were presented on an even footing  
> and people simply opted for Velocity. (I really found the  
> disingenuousness of this offensive.)
>
> Anyway, I won't dwell further on that. Actually, if the Jakarta  
> people want to push people toward using Velocity, there is maybe  
> nothing particularly wrong with this per se. Still, I think that  
> the only coherent thing would be to have a serious commitment from  
> them to keep Velocity competitive with other things in the same  
> space -- such as FreeMarker, for example. To encourage people or  
> even force them (as in the Turbine case) to use Velocity when the  
> thing is so clearly inferior and then to just pretend that the  
> better technology doesn't exist -- that strikes me as the kind of  
> thing that should be very clearly contrary to what we're trying to  
> achieve.
>
> So, it does come down to really trying to offer solutions that are  
> best-of-breed and not starting some kind of mutual admiration club.  
> I guess Daniel is looking for reassurance that we think the same on  
> this.
>
> JR
>
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> SF.Net email is sponsored by: Discover Easy Linux Migration Strategies
> from IBM. Find simple to follow Roadmaps, straightforward articles,
> informative Webcasts and more! Get everything you need to get up to
> speed, fast. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7477&alloc_id=16492&op=click
> _______________________________________________
> FreeMarker-devel mailing list
> Fre...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freemarker-devel
>