Re: [Stripes-users] I Picked Templating Engine X... Over JSPs and Stripes TLDs... and This is WHY???
Freddy, Thanks for the reply and as you have used Velocity so much I would love to hear: -- At least 3 specific key reasons why their choice of templating engine was selected over JSPs and built-in TLDs? I don't just want to hear I use templating engine X which is great for me OR because its better OR the best templating engine is X... . I honestly want to hear real CONCRETE issues that JSPs and built-in TLDs could not adequately solve OR where better solved by templating engine X and moreover WHY - in the context of large software project development (and as far as large is concerned consider multi-server multi-instance LB'ed 3/4-Tier deployment)? Thanks, --Nikolaos Freddy Daoud wrote: Will Hartung writes well: I picked up Velocity, and mind I've been using it off and on since inception which was, like, 2001. The group I was working with had their own scheme all worked out and I beat them over the head to convince them that Velocity was a better choice than rolling our own. +1 for Velocity. I've used it a lot over the years and more recently I beat the crap out of it, using and abusing it for purposes that were never in its job description, and it responded like a champ without complaining. The most recent release is May 2010 so fear not about it being actively maintained. Cheers, Freddy -- ___ Stripes-users mailing list Stripes-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/stripes-users -- ___ Stripes-users mailing list Stripes-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/stripes-users
Re: [Stripes-users] I Picked Templating Engine X... Over JSPs and Stripes TLDs... and This is WHY???
Nikolaos, I needed to load templates from the classpath. I also needed to process templates in a somewhat 'standalone' mode. Both were easier with Velocity than JSPs. I also needed a templating solution for another framework (another language, even!) that just merged a map of key-value pairs with a template to produce a result. Again, this was easier to do with Velocity than with JSPs. That's about it for me. I'm not knocking JSPs -- I'm quite happy to use them for regular Stripes development. Freddy -- ___ Stripes-users mailing list Stripes-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/stripes-users
Re: [Stripes-users] I Picked Templating Engine X... Over JSPs and Stripes TLDs... and This is WHY???
Alamgir, Thanks for the link. I looked at the project however the overview tells me very little: Rayures is a library that makes developing web applications with Stripes even more enjoyable. The View module provides integration with Velocity, and many conveniences, while the Test makes it easier to set up an automated test environment with TestNG. Unfortunately there is a lot of subjective talk in that overview... . Why is it better than JSPs and built-in TLDs? Thanks, --Nikolaos Alamgir Kahn wrote: Freddy Daoud xf2...@... writes: +1 for Velocity. I've used it a lot over the years and more recently I beat the crap out of it, using and abusing it for purposes that were never in its job description, and it responded like a champ without complaining. As an aside, I'm going to post a link here to Freddy's Rayures project that integrates Velocity for its View module: http://www.stripesbook.com/rayures.html -- ___ Stripes-users mailing list Stripes-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/stripes-users -- ___ Stripes-users mailing list Stripes-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/stripes-users
Re: [Stripes-users] I Picked Templating Engine X... Over JSPs and Stripes TLDs... and This is WHY???
On 26-05-2010 at 13:22, Nikolaos Giannopoulos wrote: -- At least 3 specific key reasons why their choice of templating engine was selected over JSPs and built-in TLDs? At my work, the choice is usually made due to a simple criterion: Will it be used outside screen rendering? If no, only the choice of web framework (e.g. Tapestry for a large leasure company) can dissuade us from using JSP's and tag files. If yes, it's usually easier to use another templating engine for the things we build. The criteria: - it must do EL path expressions (or similar) - it must be able to (re)use tag libraries - it should do custom tags, snippets or whatever they're called Freemarker fits this list well enough. Just my 0.02... Oscar -- ,-_ /() ) Oscar Westra van Holthe - Kind http://www.xs4all.nl/~kindop/ (__ ( =/ () DRM manages access in the same way that a jail manages freedom. signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- ___ Stripes-users mailing list Stripes-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/stripes-users
Re: [Stripes-users] I Picked Templating Engine X... Over JSPs and Stripes TLDs... and This is WHY???
On May 26, 2010, at 10:22 AM, Nikolaos Giannopoulos wrote:
Morten et al.,
OK... I'll bite... . I really didn't want this to devolve into my choice
of templating engine is better, and there are many comparisons out there, but
we are developing a large project and if I'm going to find the need to switch
down the road better NOW than later.
I picked up Velocity, and mind I've been using it off and on since inception
which was, like, 2001. The group I was working with had their own scheme all
worked out and I beat them over the head to convince them that Velocity was a
better choice than rolling our own.
That said, I ONLY use it for templating. I don't use it for web pages. There
I use JSP. Why? Not for any specific technical reasons. Mostly because I'm lazy.
JSPs have all sorts of features. Notably, they already work, nothing to
download, nothing to configure. Stripes works with JSPs out of the box. JSTL
and EL and Tag Files ROCK. Lazy wins, I get all of those JSP benefits for
free. That's just how I roll.
For templating though, Velocity.
Why?
It's more robust that regex solutions, and it's faster. A regex solution
basically copies your message N times. That's a waste.
It's TRIVIAL to integrate. You have the velocity.jar, and very few, if any,
dependencies. Hard to imagine anything out of Apache not using commons logging
for example, but that's probably it.
It was easy to modify. I had to hack our version (long long ago) to support a
generic variable type. We had a specific need for a rule language, and it's
data type was a generic variable that could be number, string, or date. And I
wanted better flexibility in how it worked. Notably I wanted date math (date +
1 == tomorrow) expressions. Mind, I hacked the grammar and parser here. I
offered the changes to the project but they didn't want them, so we just forked
it. No bid deal.
That was straightforward for me to implement.
Did I look at other options? No, not really. Velocity was simple and robust
enough to do what we needed. We had some other clients using it that pushed it
far beyond what I did, which is the advantage of having something that we
didn't have to develop. They wrote some very complicated reports in velocity.
Here's the integration example:
public class VelocityRenderer {
String source;
Map map;
/** Creates a new instance of VelocityRenderer */
public VelocityRenderer() {
}
public VelocityRenderer(String source, Map map) {
this.source = source;
this.map = map;
}
public String render() {
StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
try {
Velocity.init();
VelocityContext context = new VelocityContext();
for(Object key : map.keySet()) {
context.put((String)key, map.get(key));
}
Velocity.evaluate(context, sw, Page Creation, source);
} catch (MethodInvocationException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
} catch (ResourceNotFoundException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
} catch (ParseErrorException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
}
return sw.toString();
}
}
It takes a source string, which is a Velocity script, and a map of variables,
and renders it.
It's 1/2 exception handling. It can be much more sophisticated than this
(resource lookup, cached templates, etc.) I didn't need any of that.
The Velocity guys advocate using Velocity over JSP, and have a bunch of web
stuff for that that I've never used (like a VelocityServlet, and toolboxes to
add request handling in the scripts, etc.)
We've used it for emails and reports. We even used it for declarative
validation code before we picked up Javascript. If the Velocity script rendered
in to true it passed, otherwise it didn't.
So, it's a great hammer. Writing your own is simply insane.
Regards,
Will Hartung
--
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