I'm a little confused. Why aren't we joining efforts on the apache version? Why make it "a pity if a wider group of people never get the benefit of this work"? Am I missing something too obvious or too old or something? Is this code base completely incompatible? Is this a technical issue?
Taher Alkhateeb On Wednesday, November 08, 2023 04:03 +03, Jonathan Revusky <revu...@gmail.com> wrote: Greetings, I thought to let people know that there is a vastly more advanced version of FreeMarker available here: https://github.com/freemarker/freemarker3 You can build it via: git clone https://github.com/freemarker/freemarker3.git cd freemarker3 ant Or, if you want, there is a prebuilt jarfile you can grab here: https://parsers.org/download/freemarker.jar Though it is actually a rather superficial new feature, I think that one thing that people will enjoy is the new terser syntax. Basically, if a directive starts a line (aside from whitespace) there is no need for any pointy (or square) brackets. So you can just write: #if foo == bar blah blah /#if You can look here for a more complete description: https://github.com/freemarker/freemarker3/wiki/Terse-Syntax and here is an example of a template from the old test suite rewritten using the terser syntax: https://github.com/freemarker/freemarker3/blob/master/src/freemarker/testcase/template/test-switch.html In this version of FreeMarker, the #assign and #local directives (though they still work in a backward-compatible mode) were replaced with the newer #var and #set. This is (IMHO) a significant improvement and is described here: https://github.com/freemarker/freemarker3/wiki/Strict-Vars Just generally speaking though, the biggest changes are really under the hood and would not be so visible to the casual user. This FreeMarker codebase has been refactored so that it largely does away with all of those TemplateXXXModel wrappers and mostly just directly uses POJOs. (Plain Old Java Objects.) This is described here: https://github.com/freemarker/freemarker3/wiki/Under-the-Hood Various longstanding annoyances, like not being able to directly use a map with non-string keys, have been addressed. Oh, it suddenly occurs to me that many (perhaps most) people on this mailing list do not know who I am. I am effectively the original author of FreeMarker. I say "effectively" because there was a FreeMarker 1.x, which was really little more than a weekend hack. The version that 99% of FreeMarker users have used, which is 2.x, was a complete rewrite and is largely my work. As for other questions about what is going on with this, for example, why I have put some renewed effort into FreeMarker after all years... well, my main open source efforts have been going into my rewrite of that old JavaCC parser generator that FreeMarker 2.x was originally built with. The new version of JavaCC was originally called FreeCC, then when I resuscitated it a few years ago, I called it JavaCC 21, but it is now rebranded as CongoCC. So, since FreeMarker is a key part of CongoCC, I found myself adding the occasional new feature to FreeMarker (my own version, not Apache FreeMarker). For example, the feature described here https://github.com/freemarker/freemarker3/wiki/Macros-as-Functions was added to support CongoCC development back in 2020, but probably a lot of FreeMarker users would appreciate this. So, at some point, I did rework FreeMarker to use CongoCC instead of the legacy JavaCC. CongoCC is a much, much more powerful parser generator than the original JavaCC, so it makes FreeMarker development comparatively a breeze. For example, I quite recently implemented assertions in FreeMarker and this is where it is implemented: https://github.com/freemarker/freemarker3/blob/master/src/parser/Directives.inc.ccc#L417-L445 Or here is where ternary expressions are implemented: https://github.com/freemarker/freemarker3/blob/master/src/parser/Expressions.inc.ccc#L98-L118 You really should compare the FreeMarker grammar expressed with CongoCC to the one that was written with legacy JavaCC, that is here: https://github.com/apache/freemarker/blob/2.3-gae/src/main/javacc/FTL.jj So I rewrote FreeMarker (it is largely a rewrite at this point) to: (a) have a better tool for CongoCC development and (b) to provide a showcase for CongoCC's capabilities. As for my plans, well, I do think it would be a pity if a wider group of people never get the benefit of this work. Whether I intend to call this version of FreeMarker "FreeMarker 3" or rename it to "Congo Templates", I still haven't decided about that. I really only put some serious effort into the FreeMarker codebase starting this summer and the work kind of took on a life of its own. In any case, anybody who is interested in getting involved, by all means. Maybe start a discussion here: https://github.com/freemarker/freemarker3/discussions Best Regards and Greetings from Spain, Jonathan Revusky
