"Quinton McCombs" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
<snip>
Jonathan, what you don't see (and I don't hold it against you, it took
me ages to understand this), is the fact that the FM and WM support in
Turbine was never on pair with the velocity support.
<ROTFL>
Henning, it may have taken *you* ages to realize that, but.... I'm a pretty perceptive guy. I can say quite honestly that I *always* knew that... :-)
I'm not saying that I knew all the technical details you are outlining, but they're residual trivia from my POV. For starters, I knew that the FM support in Turbine was a joke, since it only worked with a 3-year-old version of FM!
The various screen and navigation classes for Velocity were always more powerful that the FM and WM support, which was only "bolted on". And this (technical) aspect is IMHO the main reason that it wasn't really used.
That the FM support was not used is hardly something that requires much explanation.
You enter a dining room and are told that you have a choice between a meat and a fish entree. However, you immediately notice that everybody else is eating meat. You ponder for a while, considering whether to order fish or meat. The waiter then whispers to you: "Order the meat."
It turns out that the fish is 3 days old.
So, like everybody else, you order the meat. Nobody ever orders the fish.
Eventually, the fish is removed from the menu and the only thing offered is the meat dish.
Somebody later proposes that fish be added as an option. This runs into the following objection:
"Nobody wants fish."
"How do you know that?"
"We used to have it on the menu and nobody ordered it."
This is the dialectic that has been going on here. I mean, the contrived, rigged nature of the scenario is blatantly obvious. Yet you expressed surprise when I and another FreeMarker developer (Daniel Dekany) got increasingly annoyed with you in that dialogue on the Vel list.
"We removed the fish from the menu because apparently nobody wants to eat fish...."
Yeah, uh-huh. Right...
Tell me the truth. Wouldn't it piss you off to have somebody lay this load of bullshit on you?
Look at the JSP view in Turbine. Yes, you can render JSPs with the Turbine servlet, but the possibilities, especially in terms of the pull code, are terribly limited. If you're looking for a political decision in Turbine, then it is the fact that the JSP View was kept even though it isn't really good but keeping it gave us another "feature" when managers were looking for a web framework to use. :-) (The average manager is able to distinguish between "JSP" and "a templating solution" but not between "some templating solutions to choose from").
Yeah, it doesn't surprise me to hear that the JSP support is largely political. I assume that XSLT support would be as well. XSLT (at least in this MVC webapp context) is probably about as useful as tits on a nun. But it makes for a good buzzword to add to your feature list...
Putting the existing FM classes back into Turbine and getting them to work with the most recent FM release might be a work of some hours. But it won't really help the FM support in Turbine, because you would be back at the situation described above. One really well supported templating engine (Velocity) and one (or more) basically useable but severely limited engines (FM, WM, you name it). It would IMHO even hurt the FM support in the long run because one of the arguments to work on a template engine independent solution would no longer be valid.
Is there something besides the coupling with the VelocityContext API that is at issue? I already gave you a simple path-of-least-resistance solution to that.
So IMHO we will have to make core code changes to get this stuff to fly right. And this is neither the work of hours but of days or weeks and we will have to make user-visible changes which is a work of releases.
Well, it sounds like you do need to carry out some significant code refactoring. But that's not anything that I can help you with. If you have any FM-specific issues, we have mailing lists and we'll be quite helpful if you ask any questions there.
Best Regards,
Jonathan Revusky -- lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/ FreeMarker-Velocity comparison page, http://freemarker.org/fmVsVel.html FreeMarker 2.3pre4 is out!
Regards Henning
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