Hi Andreas,
On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 1:11 AM, Andreas Schaefer <schaefera(a)me.com> wrote:
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. 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
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 ;-)
Cheers - Andy
Good luck and thanks for all the nice work,
Guillaume
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Guillaume Lerouge
Product Manager - XWiki
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Twitter: glerouge
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