Re: Anybody with deeper OSGi bundle can comment on freemarker.jar OSGification?

Hey Daniel,

Yes we use freemarker quite a lot in fact. You can do most all "templating"
in Liferay in either Velocity or Freemarker.

- theme (overall look and feel of the portal/site/page)
- web content (your run-of-the-mill content templating)
- DDM (run-time entity modelling + UI templating)
- ADT (java entity UI templating, allows customizing normally static
applications for java entities which implement the Liferay Asset APIs, i.e.
most of all content-centric models in Liferay)
- Workflow forms (workflow engine forms/UI)

Now we are moving more and more to freemarker due to support for jsp
taglibs of which we have many to make developers life easier and to
automatically accommodate for concerns like behaviours, styling, and
accessibility.

Velocity is a lovely template engine and has dominated Liferay mostly 'till
now. It's a slightly easier dialect for non-java programmers.

However, we have supported freemarker for several years and as we move more
toward standardized UI modelling we want to use more tags.

Freemarker is the natural choice. (Note our template engine is entirely
plugable which makes adding new template languages very simple).

You may have noticed I have CC'd Greg Amerson who is our tooling guru, the
same who is working on the freemarker debugging you have read about.

@Greg, I'd like you to meet Daniel Dekany the lead developer of Freemarker.

So, my thoughts on the needs of developers with respect to freemarker are
honestly not so many :).

In terms of language features/dialect I know of none at the moment which
are jumping out at me.

Perhaps as we rely more and more on it, performance will become more of a
concern. This is not because Freemarker does not perform well. Simply our
utilization is often so high that we have to do deep introspection into
libraries we use to eke out every last drop of performance out of them.

I can see our performance guy now (whom I've also CC'd, @Shuyang: Be
gentle!). He may point at Freemarker in the future. But it would be
preemptive to try to say if/where exactly any change might be required. At
one point it might be interesting if Freemarker engine might take advantage
of VM features like method handles and/or invokedynamic, perhaps it already
does. We may be able to donate efforts toward performance optimizations if
it comes down to it and you are amenable to accepting those.

So, we come to debugging. Perhaps Greg could speak to that topic. Maybe he
has ideas for improving the debugging support. Note he is currently
residing in China so his feedback may be delayed.

Finally, thanks for reaching out to us Daniel.

Sincerely,
- Ray


On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 5:40 AM, Daniel Dekany <[email protected]> wrote:

> Thanks for the feedback!
>
> BTW, it appears that Liferay is using FreeMarker quite a bit (and you
> aren't one the Powered By page). I'm saying that because I saw you are
> also working on FreeMarker debugging. So, I would be interested to
> hear what features you (and your users) miss the most, what issues you
> want to see fixed the most, etc. As things getting more active
> nowadays, now is a good time to influence the future of FM. (Sometimes
> there are things that are quite easy to fix in FreeMarker, only
> framework authors had to report it instead of trying to work it around
> alone.)
>
>
> Monday, May 27, 2013, 4:09:56 PM, Raymond Auge wrote:
>
> > This looks really good.
> >
> > I have not tested it, but after a cursory look I don't see any issues.
> >
> > - Ray
> >
> >
> > On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 6:01 AM, Daniel Dekany <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > Starting from 2.3.20 freemarker.jar will be an OSGi bundle, however
> > I'm not an OSGi expert at all. So if you can comment on this, that
> > would be great:
> >
> > https://github.com/freemarker/freemarker/blob/master/osgi.bnd
> >
> > The resulting MANIFEST.MF is attached to this mail.
> >
> > --
> > Thank you,
> >  Daniel Dekany
> >
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> >
> >
> >
> >
>
> --
> Thanks,
>  Daniel Dekany
>
>


-- 
*Raymond Augé* <http://www.liferay.com/web/raymond.auge/profile>
 (@rotty3000)
Senior Software Architect
*Liferay, Inc.* <http://www.liferay.com> (@Liferay)

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