Re: Varargs

"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."

Oh wow I didn't realize that.  I believed FM was your child.   =)  In that case thank you for all of your efforts - it *IS* appreciated.  FM has been a good friend to me and our projects over the past 5 years.  Thanks for saving me from <jsp:tagHell><% andScripletInsanity()

"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."

Yep, a lot of software falls right into that category.  Our main application is right there.  It needs feature X and feature Y but it's historically bloated to the point where I can't just go in and add them in 10 minutes like I should be able to... things end up taking forever and breaking random parts in very unexpected ways.  Really there's no way to fix it without burning it to the ground and starting over with a hindsight spec.  The funny thing is, this version of the product is actually the third rewrite with lessons learned from the previous two.  That's just the way software is.. "You spend years and years building the Taj Mahal, only to look at it one day and realize what a piece of !@#$ you've really created and that there's no hope of fixing it."

--
BTW I have that whole 'dom thread safety' nightmare pretty well sorted out... the fire has been extinguished.  I'll follow up with some test cases and a patch set in a week or so.


Thanks
-John



-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Dekany [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Friday, August 05, 2011 9:32 AM
To: Brian Pontarelli
Cc: FreeMarker-user
Subject: Re: [FreeMarker-user] Varargs

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.

> 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.

> 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.

--
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


> -bp
>
>
> On Aug 4, 2011, at 4:43 PM, Daniel Dekany wrote:
>
>> Is using unreleased version is a problem for you? Because I'm not sure
>> if when Attila will be available if he will be at all, so I can go
>> ahead and fix this, then you can start using it, see if it breaks
>> something. The more people field-tests something the better. (I don't
>> even use FM nowadays...)
>> 
>> 
>> Thursday, August 4, 2011, 6:25:29 PM, Brian Pontarelli wrote:
>> 
>>> Thanks for the reply. I'll let you guys take it from here ;)
>>> 
>>> -bp
>>> 
>>> On Aug 4, 2011, at 3:46 AM, Daniel Dekany wrote:
>>> 
>>>> OK, I have looked into this, and it seems that this feature (varargs)
>>>> has never worked in 2.3. FM 2.3.12 has just made things worse, as not
>>>> even explicitly passing an array (like hasRoles(['foo', 'bar'])) works
>>>> starting from there, while before 2.3.12 it certainly did. How nobody
>>>> ran into this and reported for 4.5 years is beyond be. Also, varags
>>>> has no test coverage in 2.3/2.4...
>>>> 
>>>> And now I will mostly talk to Attila (the author of BeansWrapper). The
>>>> problem is this: BeansWrapper.populateClassMapWithBeanInfo(Class) in
>>>> FM 3.0 calls componentizeLastArg(publicMethod.getParameterTypes(),
>>>> publicMethod.isVarArgs())) to calculate SimpleMemberModel.argTypes,
>>>> while 2.3/2.4 just calls publicMethod.getParameterTypes(). The
>>>> componentizeLastArg method changes the vararg's type from array<T> to
>>>> T. Thus in 2.3/2.4 the type of the vararg argument, according to
>>>> SimpleMemberModel.argTypes[theIndexOfTheVarArg], will be array<T>,
>>>> while in 3.0 it will be T. But all the other parts of the algorithm is
>>>> the same as in 3.0, so the method call will fail both with
>>>> hasRoles(["foo", "bar"]) and hasRoles("foo", "bar").
>>>> 
>>>> Would adding componentizeLastArg to 2.3/2.4 and calling it at the same
>>>> two places as in 3.0 be a sufficient fix? Would it be backward
>>>> compatible? I guess it would be, but you are still the one who knows
>>>> this stuff inside out...
>>>> 
>>>> -- 
>>>> Best regards,
>>>> Daniel Dekany
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Wednesday, August 3, 2011, 6:19:59 PM, Brian Pontarelli wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> On Aug 3, 2011, at 2:07 AM, Daniel Dekany wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Tuesday, August 2, 2011, 9:20:43 PM, Brian Pontarelli wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I've read that vararg method calls were added to 2.4.12 but I can't
>>>>>>> find any good docs on how to use them and if there are any special
>>>>>>> requirements. I have a varargs method that I'm trying to invoke from
>>>>>>> a template and I'm getting an argument type mismatch exception:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> public boolean hasRoles(String... roles) {
>>>>>>>  ...
>>>>>>> }
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> [#if user.hasRoles(["foo", "bar"])]
>>>>>>>  ...
>>>>>>> [/#if]
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Anyone know how to fix this?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> AFAR it's supposed to Just Work (assuming you are using some
>>>>>> BeansWrapper subclass as the object_wrapper setting, and it's 99% that
>>>>>> you do). Have you tried user.hasRoles("foo", "bar"), without the []?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Yeah, tried that. It then complains about trying to convert String
>>>>> to String[]. I do have a BeansWrapper sub-class, but all it does is set these two options:
>>>>> 
>>>>>       setExposeFields(true);
>>>>>       setSimpleMapWrapper(true);
>>>>> 
>>>>> Not sure how to fix it, but I changed the method to take an
>>>>> Iterable<String> and it is working.
>>>>> 
>>>>> -bp
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Best regards,
>> Daniel Dekany
>> 
>
>


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