Re: got tired of waiting for IDE support - new tool to preview FreeMarker templates

Wednesday, April 9, 2008, 9:17:57 AM, Jeromy Evans wrote:

> I've thrown together a little tool to quickly view the output rendered
> by FreeMarker.  I created it out of frustration with my favourite IDE 
> when writing custom struts2 tags.
>
> Is this useful to any of you? 
>
> http://www.freemarker-tool.com/
> ( I couldn't think of a name)
>
> The context for the template may be too basic for many purposes but I've
> still found it useful for tweaking the output for html.  See Help for a
> description of the context.
>
> If I get free time, or if there's any demand, I intend to add a feature
> to save the user-generated template and context so they can be linked 
> to.  ie. when someone asks a FreeMarker question in the struts-users 
> forum I'll paste a working example in the tool and link to it in my 
> reply.  If it's not useful to anyone else I'll probably just ditch it.
>
> Any comments, criticisms or suggestions?

I think many will find it useful, also it would be useful for learning
FTL. However, the context model should support numbers, boolean,
dates, and maps and lists as variables. So it should be recursive (due
to nested maps and lists), and there should be pulldown to chose the
variable type (that defaults to string).

I think it also would be good if you can edit multiple templates, the
first being the main template (that generates the output), the second
one being something just can include/import as, say, /t2.ftl the third
as /t3.ftl, etc.

Lastly, while an input is edited, and the output is not yet updated,
an indicator like a spinning hourglass next to the output window would
be useful. If that's not there, then you know that the output already
reflects the input.

> cheers,
>   Jeromy Evans

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


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