1 Sep
2009
1 Sep
'09
8:54 a.m.
On Sep 1, 2009, at 1:08 AM, Andreas Schaefer wrote:
On Monday, August 31, 2009, at 12:46AM, "Vincent
Massol" <vincent(a)massol.net
There are some good Velocity guides here:
http://velocity.apache.org/engine/releases/velocity-1.6.2/user-guide.html
http://velocity.apache.org/engine/releases/velocity-1.6.2/vtl-reference-gui…
-Vincent
wrote:
On Aug 31, 2009, at 9:28 AM, Guillaume Lerouge wrote:
I can agree with that. Velocity might be the simplest language for
you but for started I could not find a good Velocity language
tutorial. Hi Andreas,
On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 1:11 AM, Andreas Schaefer <schaefera(a)me.com>
wrote:
This is not really related to velocity which is the simplest language
on earth. It's related to any language you type without an IDE to
help
you. Try using groovy in wiki pages you'll have the same problem (I
know I have it, I need to preview 10 times to get something right).
That said, there are some velocity editing support in IntellilJ IDEA
and I think there's also a plugin for Eclipse which might help. You
can also use XEclipse which has syntax highlighting and some
autocompletion for velocity (you'd need to use the 1.2RC1 version). My try to deploy the Blog Plugin together with
the updated Blog
Application failed miserably today and my dislike of Velocity
reach a
new high.
Because I see the value of the scripting nature of the Blog
allowing
users to customize their Blog to a quite large degree I don't
want to
ditch that but I have a lot of problems with Velocity and the way
is
plastering over issues. I rather fail fast than late with hardly a
trail to understand what is going on.
My personal experience with velocity is more of a try & fail, try &
fail,
try and succeed one than anything else. Even though the support I get from IntelliJ is really
helpful the
strange syntax is making it difficult to code (return values through
parameters for example) but the real difficulty comes from the fact
that I cannot debug velocity in any efficient way but the real thing
I cannot stand is the fact that Velocity just ignore any problems.
This might be good for a simple web site but for an application like
a blog this is not good in my view. At least with Groovy I have a
fairly well defined language and some mailing lists that can help me
with problems and it ensures that NPEs, undefined methods etc are
handled.
I rather have a good, robust and reliable Blog application even if I
would have to download it separately. But first I need to see how
well a Blog in Groovy would work and what the limitations (like the
programming rights) mean.
To keep it easy I think I will start with implementing what we have
in BlogSheet/BlogCode to just list the current entries in a blog. If
I can then create a Blog Post Entry with Groovy I should pretty much
be able to compare the two.
Personally I am more interested to get the stuff going well for my
own Blog but I am willing to go the extra mile to provide it to the
community.
Cheers - Andy
What I
found out is that I was msot
of the time better off rewriting stuff starting with small chunks
rather
than trying to take existing code and reuse it all at once. The
current blog
is a fairly complex piece of velocity code (that is, given the
lack of
debugging tools when coding in velocity in the wiki). This is one of
the
reasons I think Sergiu's argument that "devs will be able to look at
the
code and learn from it" is not entirely true ;-)
What's really important for the blog is that it can be customized
easily at
2 levels:
- Look: an user should be able to use the panels she wants for her
blog
- Deployment: an user should be able to create a new space blog or
global
wiki blog in any space she wants
Besides that the way the blog is code doesn't matter much for the
end user.
That said I still think that it might be a good idea to convert the
Yes and we might not be able to include it in the default
distribution
since our rule so far was only velocity in the default XE XAR. scripted part of the Blog over to Groovy and keep
the rest in the
Blog
Plugin. I don't have any experience with Groovy inside XWiki but
for
sure the documentation of Groovy outside is excellent compared to
Velocity. I will use the next week to get up to speed and try to
convert a piece of the Blog over to Groovy.
Then go ahead and give it a go :-)
One thing you need to be aware of when using Groovy inside the wiki
is that
your pages will haveto be saved using programming rights. This can
cause a
number of issues, don't forget to code with an user that has them,
it will
save yo ua lot of hassle ;-)