Hello, I represent the Shibboleth project (https://www.shibboleth.net/), a widely-used open-source platform for federated authentication (SAML, CAS, and soon OpenID Connect). We make heavy use of Velocity in our codebase, as well as Spring Framework and Spring MVC.
As you may know, in their v4.x the Spring folks decided to deprecate their internal Velocity support for the Spring MVC view layer in an effort to reduce their maintenance burden. Their (new) philosophy is that third-party libraries should include Spring support components in their projects, rather than the other way around. In Spring 5.x they completed this deprecation process by removing the Velocity view layer support components from Spring MVC entirely. More details on their thinking and reasoning here: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/issues/18368 My question: From the above issue comments, I see that at least one person from the Velocity project was aware of this. Does the Velocity team have any current plans in the works to add Spring MVC support components into the Velocity project as the Spring team advocates? I searched in the archives for this list going back awhile and didn't find anything, but apologies if I missed it. If not, then what we wanted to propose/discuss was essentially porting the latest, terminal Spring 4.x MVC Velocity components into the Velocity project. We could of course do this within our project internally (and have provisionally done so, see below), but there would seem to be significant value for the entire Velocity and Spring user communities for this to be more widely available and officially supported by the Velocity project itself. So the main purpose of this email is to gauge the level of interest in doing this (or conversely objections to doing so). The sketch of the proposal would be to add a new Velocity Tools Maven submodule (e.g. velocity-tools-view-spring), which would align with the existing Tools project organization. The scope of the code would likely be very similar to what you see here in our repo, which is how we are currently supporting development work on our next major version based on Spring 5: http://git.shibboleth.net/view/?p=spring-extensions.git;a=tree;f=src/main/java/net/shibboleth/ext/spring/velocity So it's a relatively small number of classes. If the interest here is positive, we would be fine with doing the initial work to produce a patch (unless someone on the Velocity team would prefer to do the work themselves of course). The main issue I suppose is the Velocity project taking on long-term support for these components. We look forward to hearing the Velocity developers' thoughts on this proposal. Thanks, Brent
