Re: [Freemarker-devel] interested in feedback with new template engine

 On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 6:00 PM, Joe Hudson <[email protected]> wrote:
> I meant no offense.

But no offense was taken. Really. As far as I'm concerned, you've done
nothing wrong.

> I apologize for the disturbance.  I had contacted
> Daniel privately to ask for his help with some of the documentation because
> I like very much the way he is able to create formal documentation with a
> user friendly kind of style.  He an I disagreed on the approach which is
> fine - I still greatly respect his opinion.  I hadn't intended to make a
> mention to this list but during my conversations with Daniel, he mentioned
> that it would be a good idea.

There's no problem, really.

>
> As to why I started from scratch instead of forked FreeMarker:
> - I really wanted this functionality (I'm sure some people on the list are
> aware that I have been asking it for over 3 years now)
> - Previously Jonathan had mentioned that what I wanted was impossible for
> FreeMarker (granted this could be an issue with my explanation of what I
> wanted - which is why I had contacted Daniel for help with documentation)

I have no recollection of saying it was impossible for FreeMarker. But
maybe I was misunderstanding your request and we were talking a bit to
cross purposes of whatever.  Just offhand, from what I see, it is not
very hard to add the extra nested macro parameter functionality to
FreeMarker.

I think I had a lot of trouble before understanding exactly the
feature you wanted. Also, I was probably getting distracted by other
things also.

> - I wanted to start from scratch and not to have to support some legacy
> issues that FM has to (for example having '<' and '[' to identify directives
> because I would like to have a greater distinction from XML.HTML nodes and
> FM directives)

To patch FreeMarker to only recognize the square bracket syntax is
extremely easy. Basically in this file

http://freemarker.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/freemarker/trunk/freemarker/src/freemarker/core/parser/FMParser.jj?view=markup

at around line 379, you just patch the regular expressions there, 4 of
them, it seems, like change START_TAG from "<#" | "[#" to just "[#"
and so on.

But in any case, there is no problem. Even if you want to create a
template engine for the pure heck of it, you have every right to do so
and there is nothing to apologize for.

> - I had other things that I wanted to get in as well and didn't want to have
> to ask for permission or explain myself (allowing nulls, additional
> formatting character '|' etc...)

We have null support in 2.4, but we haven't had a release.

Adding a format specifier to the interpolations was something I had in
mind for a while. I was thinking of using the semicolon, like ${date ;
"MM:DD:YYYY"} or something like that.

>
> I sent this to this list and not to Velocity because I am not a member of
> the Velocity list and I respect not only the developers of FM but the
> subscribers to this list like Max Anderson and other guys.  I just wanted
> some feedback.  Sorry.

That's okay. I was really just joking when I asked why not announce to
the velocity people. It's not a rebuke at all. you can announce (or
not announce) wherever you want. It's not a problem, really. :-)

Relax. :-)

JR

>
>
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Jonathan Revusky <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> I only see it once. No big deal anyway.
>>
>> But why no announcement on the Velocity list? Maybe you think they
>> would get angry and we won't... :-)
>>
>> Of course, somebody who still uses Velocity and hasn't switched to
>> FreeMarker, why would they switch to ZipScript?
>>
>> JR
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 11:32 PM, Joe Hudson <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > [sorry if this appears more than once - I sent it from the wrong account
>> > previously and canceled the message so I don't think it will]
>> >
>> > Hello everyone,
>> >
>> > I have created a new template engine to address some missing
>> > functionality
>> > that I have wanted in FreeMarker for a long time.  I would really
>> > appreciate
>> > feedback from anyone that would like to kick the tires.  It is called
>> > ZipScript and can be found at http://www.zipscript.org (which will take
>> > you
>> > to the googlecode project page).
>> >
>> > Also, I am not terribly good at writing friendly documentation and would
>> > appreciate anyone that would like to participate in the growth of this
>> > project with me especially in the docs area...
>> >
>> > Some of the features that I have address are:
>> >
>> > - can define macro parameters as nested components (which gives you the
>> > ability to create complex UI components)
>> > - added a formatting character '|' so you can do stuff like
>> > ${myDate|"MMM
>> > dd, yyyy"} or ${myDate|short}
>> > - added boolean and object evaluators so you can get more than just
>> > merge a
>> > template with an object model to get the string results
>> >
>> > Thank you all very much.  And, thank you FreeMarker guys for such a
>> > great
>> > product.
>> >
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>> > [email protected]
>> > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freemarker-devel
>> >
>> >
>>
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>
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