Hi Andreas, On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 1:11 AM, Andreas Schaefer <[email protected]> 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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