Jeromy Evans wrote:
I have been of two minds whether to pursue this conversation and make
certain points. I strongly disagree with some of things you're saying
here, so, finally, I'll just make the points that I think need to be
made on this topic. I don't think there's a need for any further debate
about any of it. It seems you do recognize that the quote on the page in
question is outrageously misleading, and should be remedied.
One thing I'll say up front is that I can't really look at this as a
favor to me or our community. You should be doing this because it's
what's in the interest of your user community and just the general
public out there.
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
Thanks for the detailed argument Jonathon.
Jeromy Evans wrote:
Niall Pemberton wrote:
I just saw the following comment
FreeMarker is very similar to Velocity, as both are template
languages that can be used outside of a Servlet container. The
framework utilizes FreeMarker because FreeMarker has better error
reporting. However, both are good alternatives to JSP.
I've questioned that a few times myself. The paragraph doesn't do
FreeMarker much justice from a technical sense, but then again, most
Struts 2 users won't exploit the features FreeMarker offers above
Velocity,
What is your basis for thinking this? It's clear enough from the
freemarker-user list that people do use advanced features of the tool
that are not in Velocity. I just don't see offhand why the usage
patterns of people using FreeMarker in conjunction with Struts 2 would
be particularly different from users in general.
Though, the other thing is that, even if the assertion were true, I
don't know how you would know it was... it seems like a seat of the
pants conjecture...
The basis of my conjecture is that Struts 2 provides little support for
FreeMarker's more advanced features, so most users won't exploit those features.
To me, this makes little sense. It would seem that we have completely
different conceptual models of what is going on here. From my
perspective (though maybe I am the one mistaken...) you have certain
fundamental misconceptions.
There is basically no need for a framework like Struts 2 to explicitly
support FreeMarker's more advanced features. They're just there if
needed. Translatinf this idea to a JRuby result or a Groovy result. we
could say that if the front end coding is in Ruby, the view could use a
very small set of Ruby's language features or a much larger one. But
that has almost nothing to do with the controller used. And the same
applies to the use of FreeMarker's template language. Whether a project
makes very sophisticated use of FreeMarker's macro capabilities would
depend mostly on the project's requirements (and also on the
skill/experience level of the front-end coders) not on whether the
project was using Struts 2 or Stripes or Spring MVC, say.
You see, the fundamental usage pattern is that you expose your data
model to a page template and produce output. In terms of using
FreeMarker, how the data got to the template layer (whether it was put
there by Struts 2 or by Stripes or whatever) is irrelevant and doesn't
have anything or at least very little to do with the complexity or
sophistication of the templates.
As regards more sophisticated uses of templating, I was thinking about
this a while back and wrote a blog entry with some (possibly
wooly-headed) ideas.
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2006/07/designerdeveloper-division-of-labor.html
The above is worth reading if you want to understand my perspective on
this sort of thing, and some of the thinking behind FreeMarker.
The model provided to FreeMarker is a map containing the request,
response, ValueStack and a few other basic structures, where access to
the ValueStack (Struts2's core model) is limited to Struts2 tags to in
order to access OGNL. I don't know the history, but it appears the
FreeMarkerResult[1] was designed to be equivalent to the Velocity
implementation rather than to exploit FreeMarker features. Similarly,
although the Struts 2 tags use FreeMarker templates, the model is
limited and the templates don't encourage what I think you'd consider to
be best-practice.
My conjecture still stands, that as built, most Struts 2 users won't
exploit FreeMaker's better features. That's not meant as a criticism of
FreeMarker.
Take a quick look at the source:
[1]
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/struts/struts2/trunk/core/src/main/java/org/apache/struts2/views/freemarker/
[2]
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/struts/struts2/trunk/core/src/main/resources/template/css_xhtml/
Well, I provided the link to a discussion of FreeMarker vs. JSP from
Jive Software developers. Jive's product is built on top of Webwork and
FreeMarker. One of the points made in there was that Velocity simply
wasn't powerful enough for their needs. Again, it's only one data point,
but it supports the idea that a
