Hi Siegfried, Thanks for sharing your work! In my view, the main question is around how we can position the tool like what you implemented. In other words, would it belong to report generation area, simple data conversion tool area, or generic freemarker execution tool (or CLI) area? In my gut feeling, it could be best if it is possible to merge the freemarker-online-tester tool and your work together, and position it as a more generic freemarker CLI (and GUI support later?) tool. So people may download the tool to execute/test ftl sources locally with data, or we can deploy the tool as online service (freemarker-online-tester). Perhaps in the future, the CLI tool may support GUI, CLI, and web-online modes for users' convenience. So, if this vision is okay to the community, it might be worth combining both efforts into one as a new product (and as a subproject of freemarker). What do others think?
Regards, Woonsan On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 10:46 AM, Siegfried Goeschl <siegfried.goes...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Daniel, > > as far as I’m concerned > > * At the end of the day the committers & PMC decide what become part of the > project > * The same is said for adding links to external projects :-) > * The users do care about solving a problem a hand > * They don’t care a millisecond if it is part of an ecosystem or not > as long as they can find the tools they need and get their stuff done > * An alive-and-kicking ecosystem will result in new users of > FreeMarker > * They might not even care if there is Velocity or FreeMarker under > the hood :-) > * I’m aware of http://freemarker-online.kenshoo.com > <http://freemarker-online.kenshoo.com/> and I think this is a brilliant idea > > Thanks in advance, > > Siegfried Goeschl > > > >> On 6 Mar 2017, at 16:24, Daniel Dekany <ddek...@freemail.hu> wrote: >> >> Regarding if it's an useful contribution to the project. Currently, >> the Apache FreeMarker (incubating) project is only the engine itself. >> So unless we widen the scope of the project, while it certainly helps >> with the popularity/usefulness of the FreeMarker project, it's not a >> direct contribution to it. >> >> Some may point out that the project already have multiple "products", >> all in its own repository (but still under the umbrella of the Apache >> FreeMarker project): >> >> - freemarker: The engine itself, freemarker.jar. This is the only thing >> has releases. The others are just dependencies. >> >> - freemarker-docgen: Transforms XDocBook to HTML. The reason it's here >> is that both our homepage and the Manual are generated with this. >> >> - freemarker-site: The content of the homepage >> >> - Recently we started working on bringing over the small project >> behind http://freemarker-online.kenshoo.com/. So it's just yet >> another 3rd party tool, so why bring it in as a "product" of the >> project? The intent is that it will be part of our home page (so >> it's not a product with actual releases). It's a "tool" for trying >> out the engine itself, it has no other intended utility, so it >> fits in. Though the real incentive was that we saw the service being >> endangered (becoming outdated, etc.), and we want a service where >> the users can try the engine quickly. Also we have contributed to it >> substantially... we don't want those work hours to be lost. >> >> So these are all stuff used for publish/documenting the engine itself. >> >> But I'm not saying that it's totally impossible to bring in standalone >> tools as additional "products". I'm just not sure if we want get into >> that business. Because, what policy we want to follow? Why some >> project remains on GitHub, and why some become products of the >> FreeMarker project? Is that good for the ecosystem? >> >> (BTW, there's FMPP for example, another command line tool for >> FreeMarker. It has always remained an independent GitHub project. It >> was actually written by me (when I was still quite junior so I'm not >> very proud of it... but it works), so surely I could use my influence, >> but I just think it fits in. However, it's linked from the >> freemarker.org side menu, for ages... can be seen as an abuse of >> power. (-: Heck, I have never though of that... I will remove that >> link. But, note that freemarker-online is also linked there, simply >> because it's quite useful for many users. So for widely useful and >> proven stuff that's a possibility.) >> >> Anyway, anybody has thoughts about this? >> >> >> Monday, March 6, 2017, 12:07:26 PM, Siegfried Goeschl wrote: >> >>> Hi folks, >>> >>> I'm playing around with Template Engines for a couple of years and >>> over Christmas I moved some of my code from Velocity for FreeMarker. >>> >>> One piece of code which could be useful to the public is >>> https://github.com/sgoeschl/freemarker-cli >>> <https://github.com/sgoeschl/freemarker-cli> >>> >>> * Don’t now if I already re-invented the wheel :-) >>> * Please note that this is my first contact with Apache FreeMarker >>> * I would like to ditch Groovy and migrate to a stand-alone Java application >>> * It is already under ASL-2.0 >>> >>> So the question is - could this be a useful contribution to the >>> project?! As far as I know open source is not oneway only :-) >>> >>> Thanks in advance, >>> >>> Siegfried Goeschl >>> >> >> -- >> Thanks, >> Daniel Dekany >> >
