Experiences with 2.14pre1

Hi,

I just tried to upgrade our codebase to 2.4pre1 and noticed the 
following things:

Since the freemarker.core.ParseException moved to the 
freemarker.core.parser package, you can't use Spring's FreeMarkerView 
anymore, because I get a NoClassDefFound error. I copied the Spring 
sources and created my own FreeMarker24View (with a modified import 
statement) which works perfectly well.

The second time I stumbled across the very same exception was when I 
tried to replace the freemarker.jar bundled with the Jboss Spring IDE 
Eclipse plug-in. Replacing the jar file used to work well with earlier 
releases, so I thought I'd give it a try.

I haven't checked if this is the only API change that breaks backward 
compatibility with the plug-in, but in case it is (as it is with the 
Spring FreeMarkerView) it would be really helpful if the new 
freemarker.core.parser.ParseException would extend a deprecated 
freemarker.core.ParseException.

The reason why I tried to replace the freemarker.jar in the first place, 
was that FreeMarker IDE reported a syntax error when I tried to specify 
a default value for a var-args parameter.

My old macro that stopped working after the upgrade to 2.4 looks like this:

[#macro someMacro foo bar...]
    [@otherMacro bar=bar]
[/#macro]

This code used to work, I think because "bar..." defaulted to an empty 
sequence (or hash?) in 2.3.

I now get an error that "bar" is undefined when I try to pass it to the 
second macro in line 2. This makes sense, as no default is specified in 
the parameter list.

I then tried to change the declaration to [#macro someMacro foo 
bar...={}] to check whether this is valid syntax in 2.4.

This was the point where I got distracted, because my FreeMarker IDE 
told me that default values are not allowed for catch-all parameters. I 
assume the plug-in doesn't perform the parsing itself but delegates it 
to the bundled FreeMarker version, so replacing the freemarker.jar might 
actually work.


To summarize my questions:

1) Is [#macro someMacro foo bar...={}] the correct syntax or do I have 
to write [@otherMacro bar=bar!{}] in line two?

2) Would you consider to re-introduce a deprecated ParseException in 
freemarker.core in case this solved the two problems outlined above?


Kind regards,
-Felix


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