This isn't a complete answer, but you might take a look at the ContextTool.
________________________________ From: Jason Chodakowski [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tue 8/26/2008 8:11 PM To: Velocity Users List Subject: Serializing VelocityContext Greetings, I'm throwing this out there because I'm just not cool or smart enough to come up with a better way of doing what I'm going to describe... I'm hoping someone has a better idea. My company has an ongoing webish effort which makes extensive use of Velocity. As more folks start to use our stuff, one of the overwhelming questions we get is, "How can I get a WYSIWYG view of your templates so that I can edit them." The difficulty in this is due to our templates being highly nested - one template may load (parse) four or more templates depending on what's in the Context. Then there's also the issue of the Context, which in our case is the soul of any rendered page. We are working on some solutions to this. The path that we're currently on would do the following: By adding something onto the URL (we're using serialize=true) we wanted to write the entire Context of a given request/response to disk... that way an web-editor-type could use our widget to gather a fully-formed Context, loaded from disk, without needing live connections to a database, an application server container, etc. to view an assembled/parsed page - just a small Java program which can load that Object from disk, and then do a mergeTemplate type action to produce completed HTML for the editor-of-choice. I'm sure you know then where this is going... VelocityContext is not serializable, and neither are many of the VelocityTools that we put into the Context. We are contemplating creating a completely serialized version of the Velocity source tree, including tools - mostly because there's not much to do beyond implementing Serializable. Now I'm not requesting that the Velocity team do this for us unless they're already working on something similar, but I just don't know a better way to do it. I'm aware that Hibernate or perhaps something else under the JBoss umbrella can serialize non-serialized objects, but I can't find out exactly where this is addressed or how it is fixed... Hibernate, for instance does a lot of internal code altering to make their stuff work, and while I'm very impressed at how that all works, there is a massive startup overhead associated with recompilation that we don't want to incur. We were shooting for something "simple" - I know, it's never "that" simple. In many ways it all boils down to time... we need to solve our problem quickly, but I'm hoping perhaps someone else on this list, who is more clever than I am, has addressed this issue or one like it. Let me know if I need to explain more. Thanks, Jason Chodakowski --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This communication is the property of Qwest and may contain confidential or privileged information. Unauthorized use of this communication is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the communication and any attachments. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
