[OS-webwork] Re: Freemarker WAS Using SiteMesh for the UI tags

[Jonathan Revusky]

Francois Beauregard wrote:
>> I was not aware of that fact.
>> You are right. OpenSymphony seem to have got lately to a point where there
>> is a good exchange of ideas and the community moves forward. This must stay
>> the way it is right now.
>>
>> Do you remeber the reasons for the ranting?

Fran�ois, I don't believe that you should take Rickard's account of what happened as definitive, particularly when there is a complete electronic record of all of this that anybody can look at.

In the following post, a velocity users asks about monetary values in a velocity template. At some point in the thread, I respond. Here is the initial post of that thread, entitled "Comparing Monetary Value".

http://www.mail-archive.com/velocity-user@jakarta.apache.org/ msg08355.html

Here is my initial contribution to the thread and thus, I suppose, this is an example of my "ranting":

http://www.mail-archive.com/velocity-user@jakarta.apache.org/ msg08366.html

I would encourage you to read through the whole thread and how it developed. It actually becomes piquant. Quite entertaining stuff. But I think you'll see that Rickard's characterization of what happened is pretty stretched. What you'll see is that various people attempt to engage me in debate and then, when they end up looking foolish *but fairly, in legitimate technical debate* they then start the attacks on my person. And then they later claim (quite mendaciously, of course) that I was the one engaging in personal attacks on them!!!

> Yes, his belief that FreeMarker was the ultimate solution and that he
> was entitled to telling everyone of this regardless of everyone on the
> list begging for the opposite.

To be clear, I see no real problem with telling people about FreeMarker on a Velocity mailing list. There are 2 key reasons for this:

1. Velocity is a monumentally mediocre piece of work that only receives the level of usage and attention that it does because it is part of apache.org. Since there is such a huge disparity in the visibility of Velocity and something like FreeMarker, I have no compunctions about mentioning FreeMarker on the Velocity list, no more than I would in mentioning FreeMarker on a list devoted to JSP. In any case, my behavior there may have its obnoxious side. Fine. Okay.... BUT... but what is the basic grievance? At the end of the day, the end-user can always choose to use whichever tool suits him best. You may also note that my posts were invariably factual and could have been helpful to anybody making such a decision. It appears that the Velocity community did not want anybody making comparisons.

2. Velocity developers have engaged in this kind of behavior themselves on the webmacro mailing list. This was particularly obnoxious because, of course Velocity is little more than a rip-off clone of Webmacro in the first place. In fact, the origin of it is that Webmacro was supposed to be an apache project, but there was some falling out between Jon Stevens and Justin Wells and Jon Stevens started the webmacro clone that became velocity. But anyway, given the history, the velocity developers are very poorly placed to scream and holler about me showing up on their mailing list. You see, they have bad karma...

> It was (to me) quite disgusting.

Well, I'm glad you put the "to me" there in parentheses. I am quite convinced that some people derived vicarious pleasure from it. :-)

But anyway, I very honestly do not want to start a flamewar here. I don't have the time for it and I don't have any quarrel with anyone here. In fact, I have little intention of participating much more on this list. But here's the key point: "Look, there's a complete electronic record of all of this. Go look at it and see if Rickard's characterization of my 'ranting' is accurate." That's pretty reasonable, huh?

Best Regards,

Jonathan Revusky
--
Lead developer, FreeMarker project http://freemarker.org/





>/Rickard


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