FreshMarker 2.4.0 Released
Just in time for St. Nicholas Day, the latest FreshMarker release for this year is now available. In addition to several improvements, two bugs have also been fixed.
Jens
Spider Charts with Playfair
Spider charts, also known as radar charts, are among the most versatile tools for data visualization. These circular charts make it possible to display multiple variables simultaneously and present complex data sets in an intuitive form. They are particularly valuable for analyzing performance indicators, evaluations, or comparisons between different objects or time periods. Wouldn’t it be nice to have Playfair generate spider charts?
Playfair with EchoSVG
You may have noticed that the Playfair project started with the JFreeSVG library and has now switched to the EchoSVG library. Both libraries have their advantages and disadvantages, but JFreeSVG’s GPL 3.0 license in particular makes working with it difficult in many projects, often even impossible. With the next version 0.7.0, Playfair will switch to the Apache 2.0 license. This would be a little too little content for a blog post, so let’s take a look at one of EchoSVG’s weaknesses.
Playfair
While searching for a name for the new project, I looked up the inventor of charts for fun. I was amazed to find that this person actually existed. William Playfair (born September 22, 1759, near Dundee, Scotland; † February 11, 1823 in Covent Garden, London, England) is a pioneer of information graphics and is considered the inventor of bar and pie charts. What an unexpected opportunity to honor this man. The name also fits perfectly with an open source project that aims to provide simple charts without a lot of fuss. This article shows what has changed since the first bar chart and how much Java takes off our hands.
FreshMarker 2.3.0 Released
Just in time for Halloween there is a new FreshMarker release. Here is a list of the most important new features. the rest can be found in the release notes.
Unit Tests: Understanding False Positives and False Negatives
As a software developer, unit tests are an indispensable part of our daily work. They help us verify the correctness of our code and detect bugs early in the development cycle. However, like any testing system, unit tests can be flawed and lead to incorrect conclusions. In this article, I’ll explain the concepts of False Positives and False Negatives in the context of unit tests and illustrate these with truth tables.
Prospects for 2.3.0
After the release is before the release, so there are already some new features in the queue for FreshMarker 2.3.0. Since it is not always worth writing a separate article for a feature, here is a report on the new features planned so far.
Diagram As Code
I recently sat in a lecture about PlantUML and the advantages of Diagram As Code. Diagram As Code is a special variant of Documentation As Code. It is the possibility for software developers to create their documentation in the form of text files without the use of word processing systems. The advantage is obvious, the developer can use his documentation like his source code. Versioning, automatically creating comparisons, transforming, validating and much more. This gave me the idea of developing something similar.
FreshMarker 2.2.0 Released
The latest version of FreshMarker, the Java 21 template engine, is now available. Version 2.2.0 introduces several improvements and new features. Some internal improvements ensure even faster processing.
Partial Expression Reduction
The FreshMarker template engine has the Partial Template Reduction feature. This makes it possible to create a new Template from an existing Template by adding an incomplete model. Some constructs are simplified in the new Template because the data from the incomplete model could be evaluated there. Until now, this could only be used in directives and interpolations, so why not use the mechanism in expressions as well?