[Webmacro-devel] Hello and an associated project

[Patrick W. <th...@pd...>]

Hi everybody

I downloaded WM about two months ago; I had seen it a few years ago and
never got to use it.

Anyway, I'm in the process of developing some extensions to facilitate
certain types of code generation. My goal is to have a basic templating
language that allows me to quickly create code-generation templates for
Java, SQL and other languages. The key is that I'm trying to make it be
terse and yet still expressive, to avoid all the string manipulation and
conditional logic normally associated with code generation templates.

So far I'm working on a set of classes that map database metadata using
JDBC, and testing them in different configurations to see how useful they
are, and what methods make the most sense, etc. There are also some general
purpose classes that I'm putting into the Context to facilitate things like
adding commas to lists (but skipping the first or last comma), replacing
null values, etc. I had started doing this as Directives, but found that was
rather laborious--so I have very simple classes used instead. For example,
the TableMD (MD=metadata) class represents a single SQL table's metadata
read from the DB, and its getColumns() method returns a list of ColumnMD
instances (which are column metadata). The ColumnMD supports the most
obvious things you'd do with a column in a template, like

$column.AsJavaMember--converts the column name into an equivalent Java
member field name (the format of this will be controllable in the future)
$column.AsJavaAccessor--same, but gives the accessor (get...) name
$column.AsJavaDataType--the equivalent Java type for the column

Once I have a complete set (of anything) I will post to somewhere, maybe
SourceForge or Savannah. I'm looking forward to JEdit integration as well.

Question to you all: I came across Velocity on the Apache site, and was
surprised how similar many of their commands look to WM. Are the code-bases
shared, was there a common ancestor, what gives?

Thanks to everybody who contributed to WM, by the way. Both the Directive
design and the extensions I'm able to do with regular classes have shown it
to be very flexible and easy to develop with.

Also, I'm looking forward to the #macro Directive, as I was just wanting to
code one of those...

Patrick
Patrick Wright
Open Guild, LLC
http://www.openguild.net