It should be in https://freemarker.apache.org/generator/. You will need to
commit/push into https://github.com/apache/freemarker-site/tree/asf-site
for that. (See
https://freemarker.apache.org/committer-howto.html#updating-homepage)
We need to generate the web pages somehow though. I saw you try to do that
with Maven "site", but personally, I can't imagine that it can be tweaked
to generate reasonable output. Not sure how others see this. Maven "site"
is basically the Maven model dumped into HTML pages, and "reports" like
even the log of the Rat run etc. Dozens of menus and sub-pages for details
users mostly don't care about. The actual content users do care about is
stuffed under "About", and from there it's not properly navigable or
searchable, as apparently it's assumed to be a single page. I know back
then you didn't want to use the tool that's used both for the main web site
and for the FreeMarker documentation, but I think that's the most
economical solution currently (and then we also have common styling, and
common place to fix whatever technical issues), so please reconsider that.
(I can help setting that up, of course.)
Now, some more difficult-to-address problematic things. My problem is that
these just weren't concluded. Discussion just died. To be concluded can
even mean that other PMC members say we should step over these, even if I
disagree. But these should be understood, and considered. So, these are:
- Design/architectural doubts that are probably not realistic to address
much later:
- Currently, data sources are just URL-s (locations), and templates
are meant to call tool API-s to parse them. As I said back then, one
consequence is that then, you can't put parsed data into the data-model
shared by all templates (i.e., via -m/--data-model). Because, you have no
convenient/concise way to load the actual (parsed) data, instead you have
to "program it" in FTL, because the assumption was that you only
want to do
that in templates anyway. Furthermore, as I saw it just now, --data-model
actually supports some ad-hoc way of parsing the data pointed by a
data-source-like URL, as JSON, YAML, maybe some more. Here's an
example of
that: `-m config=env:///DB_CONFIG#mimetype=application/json`. So
there is a
need actually. But compared to what you can do in templeats, it's totally
different, and of course very restrictive. I was also looking for a less
"programmatic" way of loading data because even doing it in templates is
not very friendly as it is. (For ultimate flexibility you might need
program logic for sure, but certainly not just to grab a
worksheet from an
Excel file.) We also should have a POC for loading from a less
file centric
data source, like from a DB with a SQL query, to see if the concept works.
- Not sure what's with template-driven VS data driven output
generation. Data driven is when you generate one output file per
some data
unit (like per JSON file, or per DB record), and all is transformed by a
common template. How would that look currently in freemarker-cli?
- The Maven plugin provides very different functionality than the CLI.
The original concept was that they are just two interfaces to the same
product. That was also brought up, and I don't think it was addressed much,
like, why you disagree, if you do, or what's going on. Anyway, regarding
what we have now. The naming implies that, as both are "FreeMarker
Generator", just one is "CLI", and the other is "Maven". But as far as I
see, they are two different "products" really, focusing on different use
cases. So, if it stays like this, then some of them have to be renamed at
least. Or I don't know what others think we can do. (Then it's still
somewhat weird to release them together.)
(I have also run through the CLI documentation, and found a lot of less
fundamental things to address, but I don't want to overload the thread.)
Also, if the project is released mostly as it is now, what will we promise
regarding backward compatibility? What do we communicate about the
matureness of the project?
On Wed, Jul 1, 2020 at 8:29 AM Siegfried Goeschl <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I'm pretty much finished with the stuff I would like to have for the first
> public release but there is a still a lot of work ahead
>
> * FREEMARKER-148 [freemarker-cli] Make usage of "DataSources" more
> "Freemarker" like
> * FREEMARKER-150 [freemarker-cli] Setup "freemarker-generator" web site
> * Setup the release process (Daniel, I guess I need some help here)
> * An iteration of reviews and discussions
>
> Some thought along the line
>
> * I would like to finish FREEMARKER-148 this week
> * Daniel, any suggestion where to host the public website?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Siegfried Goeschl
>
>
--
Best regards,
Daniel Dekany
