Re: [Webmacro-devel] Hello and an associated project

[Eric B. R. <eb...@tc...>]

> 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.

A lot of us here are doing code generation with WM.  The code 
generation I'm doing is very specific to my little world.  It'll be 
interesting to see something that is a bit more flexible.

> 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

any thoughts of using XML as well?

<snip>

> 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?

No.  The code-bases are not shared.  The common ancestor is WebMacro.  
:)  At the time, the Apache Group didn't like WM's license, so they 
created Velocity.  Our license issues have since been worked out.  I'm 
sure Velocity is a great product, but we like WM.

> 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.

Brian did a great job with the plugable directives.  I've made quite a 
few myself.  Really easy and powerful.

eric