Re: Varargs

Friday, August 5, 2011, 4:56:51 PM, Brian Pontarelli wrote:

> On Aug 5, 2011, at 7:31 AM, Daniel Dekany wrote:
>
>> Friday, August 5, 2011, 1:24:13 AM, Brian Pontarelli wrote:
>> 
>>> Unfortunately not for this. It is used in our Clean Speak product
>>> that goes out to numerous customers. I'd be willing to test it on
>>> other projects. We have replaced everything with FM at this point.
>>> 
>>> It is interesting that you don't use it any longer.
>> 
>> There's nothing strange in that actually. I'm afraid many starts to
>> believe that FM is my child, but it's not so. I'm a glorified
>> contributor whose main contribution was writing the FreeMarker Manual.
>> But I see the authors around less and less (and BTW they were also
>> ended up doing this without any business interest behind). Luckily for
>> FreeMarker I keep doing some maintenance work... but I haven't even
>> used Java in the recent years much, let alone FreeMarker. It's rather
>> just that I have some emotional attachment and I don't want to see it
>> to become totally abandoned.
>
> Gotcha. I'm sorta the opposite. All of my projects that I don't use
> any longer I am comfortable letting completely die. Or I rewrite
> them so I can use them again.

BTW I'm still interested in templating (for Java/Scala), because as I
spent a lot of time with FM (and seeing what problems users have) I
have developed a lot of itches that I want to scratch. But, while
there's still a lot of space for improvements in FM, I see FreeMarker
as something that you can't *truly* fix with evolutionary approach.
Too much historical baggage, far too much compatibility constraints.
Frustrating. OTOH creating a better cruiserweight template engine
(like FM is) would be a lot of time, and I couldn't find that time so
far, despite I'd love to. It would be a worthy investment for the Java
ecosystem; what's that few thousands hours spend on creating such an
engine compared to the time (and hair) users lose due to using an
inferior engine.

> But I understand when life changes and
> you no longer use a technology or even code much for that matter. I
> could also see changing to a different technology but still work on
> one or two of my open source projects.
>
>>> Perhaps I should start getting into the code more to help out.
>> 
>> Contributors (of sufficient quality) are highly welcome! The most
>> important would be contributors with some persistence. People who
>> don't just jump in for a patch then jump out. Also, in general it
>> would be good if companies who depend on FM invest into it.
>
> Love the aside. Inversoft would love to invest into FM. As I said, I
> see many companies starting to use it and building it into our core
> business is probably something I'll have to consider for later this
> year and next. I would have 2-3 developers who would be working on
> FM daily and possibly creating patches as well.

(I assume they would work *with* FreeMarker daily, not *on* it.)

> I'd probably fork it to be safe and also start on some of the more
> major rework I've brought up on the list. We can talk when the time
> is right about pushing back to master.

If you plan to do serious work on FM, better discuss it on the
freemarker-devel list first. Without that, there's a danger that we
can't merge it back into the master due to some disagreement, such as
backward compatibility issues. Then you end up with your own fork,
InvestFreeMarker or whatever, which is probably not good for you
either.

And of course, whatever path you chose, use the 2.4 branch on GITHub.
Or if you are willing to take some extra risk and extra work, 3.0 (SVN
trunk). Would be great if someone picks that up... if you build its
Manual, there's a change log there.

>>> I know there are a lot of companies switching to FM from JSPs and
>>> other technologies, so I would expect that having a committer that
>>> has select FM for everything and uses it all day every day would be
>>> helpful.
>> 
>> Yeah, it's very important to use your own product. (It's not my
>> product as I said, but you see the point.) Whenever I used FreeMarker,
>> even if for a week, I ended up adding some new features, or fix some
>> annoyances that otherwise I would probably never hear about.
>
> Yeah. All my open source projects I use day-to-day.
>
> -bp

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


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