Thoughts on agile software development
At the end of the summer vacation, here is the last post on the topic of Partial Template Reduction for the time being. The basic algorithm was presented in the first two articles. In this article, the missing variable support is added.
In the first article on the implementation of the Partial Template Reduction feature, a few basic functions were created. This part deals with the implementation for the If-, Switch- and List- Directives.
This is an article that reports directly from the bowels of FreshMarker. It is therefore mainly worthwhile for readers who want to know a little more about how FreshMarker works.
Anyone working with monetary amounts in Java should definitely take a look at the Moneta project. A long time ago there was an article on this subject – JSR 354 – Your number for the money. Surprisingly, however, I had forgotten about Moneta support for FreshMarker. I’ll make up for that now.
Some blog posts are about ideas and not solutions. This has the pleasant advantage for the author that the content of the contribution does not (yet) have to work. It also saves the developer work if the audience does not appreciate the topic. When working with templates, there are always a number of variables that are processed in a template with always the same value. It would be nice if you could save computing time there.
I really like it when I can add new features to FreshMarker, especially if they are easy to implement and integrate elegantly into the overall system.
The last article described how the .version variable in FreshMarker can always be kept up to date. In this article, we want to simplify the use of the variable.
As the .version variable was previously of the string type, it was only possible to work with the string comparison operators and built-ins.
FreshMarker is strongly characterised by KISS and YAGNI. This makes the template engine lean and yet powerful. But in some places, the simplicity leads to careless mistakes.
In the first versions, the system variable .version was defined as a constant for the FreshMarker version. Unfortunately, this meant that the version number was regularly forgotten to be updated before the release.
With Partial Template Reduction, the template is filled with a fraction of the necessary data and thus simplified as far as possible. This articel presents the first part of the implementation.
Sometimes changes to a library are made so easily that it’s not really worth talking about. The Maven Plugin from posts Build Automatisierung mit eigenen Mojos verbessern and Trivial Pursuit – API MarkDown generates AsciiDoc documentation for simple OpenAPI descriptions. So far, the Maven Plugin uses a JSON description as input format. Since the YAML representation is used more frequently, its support would also be desirable.