Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
Jonathan,
Knock it off.
It's 2008. You've been unsuccessfully charging this windmill for 7 or 8
Unsuccessfully? By what measure?
years now, and you still can't remain civil in a conversation.
Look, I was about as civil to Adrian Tarau as the occasion warranted.
This guy answered a private note, that was *obviously* meant to be
private, on a public forum. You don't do that. For me to call him a
little dipshit etcetera was fairly light fare, given what he did I mean,
you just don't do that!
Go back and look... okay, here it is:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.jakarta.velocity.devel/13267
Look for the message he's responding to in the archives. It's not there.
That's because what he was responding to was a private email. He then
decided to answer that private email on this forum, lecturing me about
*my* manners. What's your opinion of the manners and nettiquette there?
I mean, to be saying that I'm not being civil when responding to this
without any recognition that it was in response to outrageous
provocation... that's just absurd.
But the civility issue is a red herring anyway. It's just that you have
nothing else to sink your teeth into. What it's really about is me
making a bunch of truthful statements that you don't like me making, the
things I've been saying about the history of the project, the state it's
in... And that you don't care to dispute any of it factually is just
devastating. I mean, of course everything I've said has been true,
including about the copycat origins of project.
You know, that really wasn't a very nice thing to do. Also, as I said,
continuing to promote something that is this technically obsolete as if
it was state of the art, that's not a very nice thing to do to people.
It really isn't.
But anyway, do you have any factual dispute about anything I said? I
mean if somebody showed up on the FreeMarker-dev mailing list and said a
series of false things about the history of the project and so on, I'd
make a point of correcting them. It's like you just concede that
everything I've been saying is just true. Because I think it stands to
reason that if you could take issue with anything I'm saying, you would.
The whole civility business is just because you're kind of up the creek
without a paddle in terms of rebutting anything I was saying.
Go away, please.
On what authority? I thought in the so-called Apache way, or whatever,
you lose your committer status if you don't commit anything for, I
dunno, was it six months? A year? When was the last time you did any
work in this project?
And besides, on what grounds? If everything I've been saying is factual,
why shouldn't I say it?
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
Velocity or FreeMarker: Looking at 5 Years of Practical Experience
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2007/12/velocity-of-freemarker-looking-at-5.html
geir
On Mar 9, 2008, at 1:21 PM, Jonathan Revusky wrote:
Adrian Tarau wrote:
Jonathan,
Basic common sense? Based on your long posts on Velocity forum, I
think I can ask you if you have some common sense.
Adrian, you little dipshit, whatever long posts I wrote on this forum
were responses to other public posts on the forum. I wrote you a note
in private and you responded on the public forum. That is the
violation of nettiquette I am referring to. If you don't understand
that you are not supposed to do that, as I said before, you don't
understand much.
Well, it's not just that, Adrian. You're such a despicable hypocrite.
I mean, why did you respond in public to a private note? Obviously to
try to goad me into starting some kind of flame war or whatever. You
try to goad somebody into responding and then you say "tsk tsk, look
what a bad guy you are".
Typical stuff, but it's pathetic. I mean, you're pathetic, Adrian.
If you really think Velocity is a dinosaur, you could let him
die(with some respect if you say it meant something 7 years ago).
7 years ago (maybe closer to 8 years ago) Velocity was written by Jon
"Monkey see, Monkey do" Stevens as a copycat clone of an existing open
source project called WebMacro. It was such a mindless copycat job
that he even copied some rather strange limitations of WebMacro. One
such thing was that WebMacro had no support for decimal numbers, only
integers, probably because the original author had not got round to
implementing it. You know, really, it's just like a dim student who
copies another student's exam answers word for word, including the
spelling mistakes.
The really humorous thing about this is that, at a later stage, when
people showed up who obviously needed decimal numbers, Velocity
maintainers (rather than just implementing decimal number support)
spent all kinds of energy arguing that the lack of decimal numbers in
Velocity was the result of some kind of profound philosophical
thinking on their part,.. yeah, like they'd really thought about it
and decided that integers were good, but decimal numbers bad. Of
course, everybody who knew the history of the project knew that
Velocity lacked decimal number support because it was a mindless copy
of Webmacro, which in turn lacked decimal number support.
In any case, do you think that's really a very nice thing to do? You
write a mindless copy of somebody else's work and then you use the
apache.org projection to eclipse the original pioneering work? It's
the kind of thing Microsoft historically does, but at least that's to
make money, so it makes sense. The origins of the Velocity project
really are in behavior that is somewhat pathological.
I mean, how would you feel about this if you were the original author
of WebMacro? It's really not very nice. These really aren't very nice
people.
Now, to be fair, all the original authors of Velocity, anybody who
designed or implemented any significant part of the codebase, are long
gone. What you have now is a set of poeple who have taken on the role
of being "owners" of the project, because it's some kind of feather in
their cap or something. But really, if you really look at it, what
they're doing is totally masturbatory, putting out infinitesimal
incremental releases of a product that is 6 years behind the state of
the art in its space.
And again, aside from being rather pathetic, is that really a very
nice thing to be doing? I mean, the problem is that a lot of people in
this field are pressed for time and cannot evaluate everything
properly, so many people see something is on apache.org, and they
reason, okay, I'm using the Apache Web Server, or I'm using tomcat, so
it makes sense to use the templating engine that comes from apache. So
this, and basically anything on apache.org, gets a level of attention
and usage totally out of proportion to its technical merit. So, you
can see why people would end up thinking that Velocity is a reasonable
option and use it.
The problem is, of course, that, eventually many people end up
realizing waht's up with this. Consider what Max Andersen is saying in
this blog entry:
http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/AStoryAboutFreeMarkerAndVelocity
Here is a quote:
"The choice originally fell on Velocity since it was the biggest
player around, and I added it naively thinking that the error and log
handling could not be that bad if so many people were using it and if
there were an issue it would be fixed soon. As time went by I learned
that it was definitely not the case."
He's openly saying that he didn't research the alternatives, because
it was highly visible and he figured it couldn't be that bad (though
he later learns it is... :-)) Basically he's saying in code: "Jeez
they tricked me, I thought this was something fairly up to date that
was being properly maintained, but it's not. Don't be tricked."
If you think FreeMarker is the brightest start above the horizon,
Look, it's quite normal that I and my collaborators would take pride
in our work. That's par for the course. What my blog entry I pointed
to clearly documents is just how frequent it is that people start
using Velocity, find it insufficient, and later migrate to FreeMarker.
I pointed out that some of the most visible projects in the java world
did this: Netbeans, Hibernate, Webwork/Struts 2. They all had
significant investments in using Velocity for templating, and later
switched to FreeMarker. That's what I'm saying here:
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2007/12/velocity-of-freemarker-looking-at-5.html
I'm not saying "In my opinion, FreeMarker is great". I am saying that
the people behind these projects I mention, surely some of them among
the most talented java programmers around, did this Velocity to
FreeMarker migration. That's the point being made. If you're going to
respond to something, answer what the person is actually saying.
Of course, you don't have to trust the developers of Hibernate,
Netbeans, or Struts 2, you could do your own evaluation and come back
and tell people what you found out. That would be a much better use of
your time than pathetically trying to flame me resorting to this kind
of straw-man argumentation.
you should let the users to discover FreeMarker by themselves.
Well, that's an absurd statement in this context, because really, it's
pretty obvious that Velocity, like Struts 1.x and other obsolete
things, still has a large user base because of the visibility
advantage that these apache projects have. If somebody in my position
is going to create a better alternative, and just passively wait for
people to find out about it, that is rather ridiculous. I tend to
think that we don't do enough publicity for the project, but that's
the way it goes, In the time I have to spend on the project, I prefer
to hack code rather than write public relations stuff. And my
collaborators are the same, no doubt.
If there is somebody out there looking for a template engine and he's
going to stop to Velocity without evaluation other projects, it's his
fault
Yes, it is his responsibility ultimately. However, much of the problem
is that people don't have the time to evaluate everything properly,
and often just choose the thing that's most visible in its space.
Clearly that's what Max Andersen (to his later regret) did. Obviously,
the people in all those projects I mentioned that switched to
FreeMarker after using Velocity extensively for some time, if they had
the decision to make over again, would have just used FreeMarker from
the very start, since that would have saved them all transition costs,
and they'd have been using the more capable tool from the start.
Yes, ultimately the developer is responsible for his or her choice of
tools. However, when you're pushing something that's obsolete, and
leveraging this apache effect to do so, you're increasing the
probability that people will opt for that.... I mean, it's not a very
nice thing to do. These aren't very nice people.
if fails(if he finally realized Velocity doesn't have all the features
he needs). It's his bad, not because Velocity is a *junk*, is just
because he didn't took some time to evaluate at least 2 projects. Even
if you fail to choose the right project(the reason doesn't matter), it
is still useful for you, everybody learns from mistakes. Even with
Velocity, most of the problems will be on your project side. Those
missing feature will not block you form releasing your project, I can
tell you that.
That you can do a lot of useful work with something that is obsolete
is not at issue. One could dust off that 386 in the cellar and fire it
up and run some old wordperfect and lotus 1-2-3 and do a lot of useful
work. The central point is whether people should be pushing something
that is technically obsolete, as if it was state of the art. I submit
that that is unethical and really, quite simply not a very nice thing
to do.
Now, I was going to ignore your silly attempt to goad me by responding
to a private message on a public forum. What finally got my goat, I
think, was when Nathan Bubna referred to the proposed blockmacro
feature as an "an exciting new idea" or something like that. I mean,
that kind of thing just gets to be too much. I think JSP 2.x has had
that for years too.
If you search after "java template engine" in Google, you'll find
Velocity and FreeMarker, so it would be really hard to miss
FreeMarker and choose Velocity(if you're afraid of that). Some people
could use Velocity even if it lacks some features just because of the
syntax, or just some other "stupid" reasons.
This is not about coding style, features and not even
performance(even if it is an important aspect). Even if you do a code
review, some similar rules applies : review the code and not the
person(project), ask for the reason why the code is as it is, ask
before accuse, etc, etc.
What are you talking about?
I'm not going to continue arguing with you why you shouldn't behave
like this, I think if you didn't got it until now it is too late to
try now. I will not be one who will "turn you to the light" :),
that's my personal feeling. My personal advice is let the community
to grow around you and let others live with their projects. In the
end, everybody will win.
No, Adrian, everybody wins when the things being offered are all
approximately state of the art. When you have people pushing something
obsolete, at least some people lose. They waste valuable developer
time with things that they shouldn't have wasted time with. That was
pretty clearly what happened in Max Andersen's "Story about FreeMarker
and Velocity"
(http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/AStoryAboutFreeMarkerAndVelocity ) Not
only did Max lose a lot of time with Velocity, the users of his
HIbernate Tools project clearly did.
The basic logical fallacy you're engaging in is the idea that all
choices are valid. I walk into the local bakery and they've got all
kinds of bread, right? They've got french bread, german style dark
bread, sourdough, rye.... I have choice and they're all valid choices.
Yeah, that's a lot better for the consumer than only having one kind
of bread.
BUT THAT'S ONLY IF THE BREAD IS ALL FRESH!!!
If the only freshly baked bread there is the rye bread, say, and the
other choices are all several days old and stale and hard, then my
ability to choose among different kinds of bread offers no extra
value. Obviously, because there is only one kind of bread that is
fresh. In fact, in this scenario of choices, the consumer would
clearly be better off if the bakery only offered that one kind of
bread, because then the he could not ever purchase the stale bread by
accident. And of course, that becomes increasingly likely when the
stale bread is displayed prominently as if it was fresh.
And what's the difference between that and Nathan Bubna gushing about
exciting new ideas that have existed in competing products for 5 years
or more? I mean, encouraging people to be so misguided about what the
state of the art in the space is, it just leads people to waste their
time.
The guy who started the original discussion (this time round, it's
come up at least a few times before, but nothing was ever done) I
wrote that guy a note in private (to which he did NOT respond in
public, of course) and a while later, I have some further
correspondence with him and he is now using FreeMarker. Just an
example. Rational, pragmatic people have no particular interest in
wasting their time. He sees that another project already has the
features in mature form that he was starting to implement in Velocity,
and bango, he just switches to that.
Best wishes,
Adrian Tarau.
PS. It was not my intention to reveal your private message, it was
more an "automatic" reaction to the words "project", "junk",
You're lying, Adrian. It's was not an "automatic" reaction. An
automatic reaction would involve hitting reply-to and it would go back
to me. You quite consciously changed to the destination address so
that it would go to the public forum.
"mine is better" based on my personal experience. My apologies to you.
I don't think I can accept the apology. I don't think I can accept an
apology that (a) contains an obvious lie and (b) is in a message that
is such a self-righteous lecturing tone.
Feel free to write a proper apology when you've cooled off.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
Velocity or FreeMarker: Looking at 5 Years of Practical Experience
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2007/12/velocity-of-freemarker-looking-at-5.html
> If you really want to help somebody(who reached the end of the
road with Velocity) just reply with a link to FreeMarker and let the
user decide, before you will write long(or short) paragraphs about ...
you know ... junk.
-----Original Message-----
From: news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jonathan Revusky
Sent: Saturday, March 08, 2008 4:55 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Call a velocity macro
Adrian Tarau wrote:
Hello Jonathan,
/"Well, in general, once you want to do anything moderately complex
with velocimacros, the thing breaks because it's.... *junk.* :-)"/
It's not nice to say about a different library(a "competitor") "it's
junk", even if the library is not as good as yours(I'm not sure if
you a commiter or just a user of FreeMarker).
What's not nice and a clear violation of nettiquette, as well as
basic common sense, is to respond to a private message (one that was
clearly meant to be private) in a public forum.
Well... okay, I guess you just don't know that. If you don't know,
you don't know. However, it stands to reason that if you don't know
that, there are may be plenty of other basic things you don't know.
So, first of all, there is no onus on me, particularly in a private
note, to pretend that I think that Velocity is anything other than
obsolete junk.
I agree, velocity has some weak parts, but this doesn't mean is "junk".
Well, that's debatable. There's no clear definition of what "junk"
means. A key characteristic of junk, at least most junk, is that, at
one point in the past, it was something of value. Some 386 or
486-based PC lying around in someone's basement is junk, but at some
point in the past, it was a highly valued state of the art piece of
equipment.
Getting back to niceness, since you accuse me of not being nice, one
thing that wouldn't be nice would be to sell that old 386 or 486 to
someone who had no knowledge of computers and represent that it was
something that was state of the art and so on.
I'm not pro Velocity and against FreeMarker of vice versa, and I am
glad for the existence of projects like Velocity or FreeMarker(all
the Apache projects, etc).
Besides nettiquette, a whole aspect of this you don't seem to
understand is that projects are really only useful if they are
approximately competitive with the state of the art in their space. I
could write a simple text editor or database this weekend and start
announcing it on all the appropriate forums. However, it would be a
complete and utter waste of time. Not only would I be wasting my own
time (no big deal) but I would trying to get people to waste their
time as well. When things like emacs and jedit exist, nothing I could
write in short order would be remotely of any interest to anybody.
Look, it takes a certain ego and nerve to announce your work to
fellow professionals on places like freshmeat.net and
theserverside.com etcetera. To do this takes a certain ego. You have
to believe that, what with all the things out there that, people
really should take the time to look at what you've done. It has to be
broadly competitive with the state of the art.
So let's play nice...You can post articles about "FreeMarker is
better that Velocity" but do it with professionalism.
The whole idea that I, in the name of "professionalism" have to
pretend that the emperor is wearing any clothes, particularly in a
private note, is just absurd. Even in public there is no particular
need for me to do so. You may have noticed that people who review
movies online and elsewhere do not feel obliged to tell you that
every movie that comes out is actually good. And likewise, I am under
no obligation to say that every software tool out there is good. I
don't consider Apache Velocity to be something of high quality, to
say the least. Not only is it lacking in features that really should
be considered by now to be basic to templating in the web space, it
embodies numerous first order mistakes in design and implementation
that, in over 7 years of existence, nobody has put in the effort to
remedy.
In my considered opinion, it is naive and misguided to feel gratitude
to ASF for something like Velocity. I believe that if Apache were run
in a way that really reflects its charter, to be of benefit to the
overall developer community, something in the state of Velocity would
be labeled as abandonware. Basically, the maintainers would have been
put on notice that they had to either get the thing in a state that
it is approximately competitive in its space, or the front page of
the project would say something like "Hi, I'm an abandoned piece of
software. If you want to adopt me, here is the procedure to do so."
If Velocity and the other many projects in the same state were
labelled that way, it would be of much greater benefit to the larger
community. First of all, people would be dissuaded from investing
energy into something that is obsolete and unmaintained. Also, people
who actually do want to do the work of maintaining the project would
have a chance to do so.
But alas, obviously this is not the case. And specifically, that is
why so many software projects out there have initially used Velocity
(based on the belief that it was approximately competitive and being
maintained) and later had to switch to another tool, typically
FreeMarker. Some of the best known open source projects in the java
world went this route -- Hibernate, Netbeans, WebWork/Struts 2.
Obviously very many valuable developer man-hours were squandered this
way because Velocity was advertised as an active cutting edge project
when it wasn't.
I document this in a blog entry. See:
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2007/12/velocity-of-freemarker-looking-at-5.html
PS . My framework(yet another java framework??? :) ) allows me to
choose between any template engine without modify any Java code so
it is transparent for me in general. This situation with calling
dynamically a macro is the first exception in years, usually I have
anything I need in Velocity, I don't need to think about another
library(not that the Velocity is the only good template engine, but
I got used with it).
What you are saying is a big nonsequitir really. If I only used the
386 or 486 computer I mentioned above (along with applications of
that vintage) I would probably think it was great, assuming that I
had no exposure to the current state of the art in personal
computing. Sure, it's probably true that you have not felt that
features were missing from Velocity. Similarly people who have only
used procedural programming languages like C or FORTRAN or whatever,
may feel that they are not missing any of the features in more modern
object-oriented languages. However, once they do make the migration,
they realize that there are many far more elegant maintainable
solutions to problems that are now easy to implement that were not
really possible before. In any case, we see from many of these
threads that other people are feeling the lack of basic templating
features -- macros with an associated block, optional/default
parameters, and so on.
In any case, I imagine you (and some other people) won't be happy
about this note I have written. However, you do seem to be suffering
from some very basic misconceptions about.... well... a whole bunch
of things. I write this on the forum, not just because you replied to
me here, but also because surely other people are suffering from
similar misconceptions, and if you don't take what I'm saying to
heart, maybe somebody will, so I won't be just venting. It will have
served some purpose.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project http://freemarker.org
Velocity or FreeMarker: Looking at 5 Years of Practical Experience
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2007/12/velocity-of-freemarker-looking-at-5.html
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
Adrian Tarau wrote:
I've always used #if to implement the 'switch' but I think, even
for 3-4 conditions, the template will look cleaner.
Instead of
#if('renderLabel' == $macroToCall)
#renderLabel($component)
#elseif('renderInput' == $macroToCall)
#renderInput($component)
#elseif(...)
...
#end
we will have
#call($macroToCall $component).
This kind of thing is trivial in FreeMarker. For example, suppose
you had:
<#assign macroHash = {'renderLabel' : labelMacro, 'renderInput' :
renderMacro, .... >
and then, supposing you have an action string, like suppose:
[#assign action = 'renderLabel']
then you could invoke the macro via:
<@macroHash[action] component />
The thing is that macros in FreeMarker are variables, and can be in
hashes or assigned to variables or whatever, and also the foo in
<@foo/> to invoke the macro can be any arbitrary expression.
So, for example, suppose the macro you want to invoke is in the
string macroName, you could invoke it via:
<@.vars[macroName] component/>
(.vars is a special built-in hash that contains the variables
available in the template and since macros are variables as well,
.vars[macroName] is the macro with the name macroName and it can be
invoked this way, or you could create a variable.
<#assign myMacro = .vars[macroName]>
and invoke it via:
<@myMacro component/>
Right below this, Mr. Van Bergen mentions Anakia, which is an
add-on to Velocity for processing XML. He neglects to mention that
FreeMarker provides similar XML processing functionality (though
the implementation is much more complete, since it supports XML
namespaces, for example) as part of its core feature set.
Declarative XML processing is supported in FreeMarker via the
#visit and #recurse directives, which are core directives in the
FreeMarker language. One would infer from what the article says
that XML processing is a point in favor of Velocity, when, really,
quite the opposite is the case. The XML processing functionality
available for Velocity is add-ons like Anakia and DVSL that are
basically abandonware, where the XML processing support in
FreeMarker is a core part of the product, and is clearly supported.
Well, in general, once you want to do anything moderately complex
with velocimacros, the thing breaks because it's.... junk. :-)
Here is a blog entry I wrote regarding some of this sort of thing:
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2007/12/velocity-of-freemarker-looking-at-5.html
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
In case of a value outside the 'domain' you will get an exception
"Macro not found ....".
We could have even a directive which will simulate the switch
default branch.
#callWithDefault($macroToCall $defaultMacro ....) - of course the
name should be shorter.
Christopher Schultz wrote:
Adrian,
Adrian Tarau wrote:
I have the following problem : I would like to call a macro but
the macro
name must be a variable.
This is more of a question for the user's list, not the dev list.
In the future, please post there.
Ex: instead of #renderLabel($component) to have #call("renderLabel"
$component) - of course "renderLabel" can be any (existing)
macro name.
How many possibilities can you have for $component? Are they
unlimited, or constrained to maybe 5 possibilities? I'm wondering
because you could easily do it like a switch:
#if('renderLabel' == $macroToCall)
#renderLabel($component)
#elseif('renderInput' == $macroToCall)
#renderInput($component)
#elseif(...)
...
#end
-chris
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