Thoughts on agile software development
In the first article on static FreshMarker templates, some basic thoughts were put on paper. This article is intended to set a first milestone on the way to supporting much faster templates than before. As a nice side effect of this initial work, a pretty printer for FreshMarker templates will be created.
The template engine FreshMarker occupies a middle position in terms of processing speed for the benchmark displayed on the FreshMarker project page. In line with the concept of a dynamic, expandable engine, a noticeable acceleration of processing is not to be expected. The question therefore arises as to which concept can be thrown overboard in order to significantly increase speed.
The follow-up article on FreshMarker Features took a little longer because there was simply no feature that wanted to manifest itself in a plugin. In the FreshMarker Includes article, the features for activating and deactivating functionalities within FreshMarker were presented. The outlook was given that FreshMarker plugins should also be able to contribute their own features. How this can work is explained in this article.
Nothing is so good that it can’t be reworked. The switch directive in FreshMarker differed from the FreeMarker variant quite early on. FreshMarker’s switch directive does not have a fall-through mechanism. This mechanism is a legacy of the C language family, whose switch statements with break also found their way into the template syntax. Since the end of 2024, FreeMarker now also has a new switch directive. How can this be incorporated into FreshMarker?
In the first article on the Include Directive, I showed how this directive can be implemented in FreshMarker. Although additional content can now be inserted into the template, some additional details are still missing. An important detail is the avoidance of recursive includes. These usually never end well. The following template recursive.fmt shows the simplest form of the problem.
Some time ago I had the pleasure of giving a talk about FreshMarker at the Java User Group Bielefeld. At this event, the question arose as to why FreshMarker does not have an include directive like FreeMarker. The include directive can be used in FreeMarker to insert additional content into templates.
Christmas is a contemplative time. You meet up with friends and family and enjoy being together. Until a family member gets in touch and asks for a new printout of the family tree. Family trees were a topic on this blog in 2018 and since then it has been rather quiet on the subject.
Am 8. Januar 2025 ist es soweit, der erste Vortrag über die Template Engine FreshMarker. Um 18 Uhr stelle ich die Kernfunktionalitäten der Engine vor und erläutere außerdem, was ein Entwickler neben dem Programmieren, sonst noch alles beachten muss. https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/de-DE/java-user-group-bielefeld/events/305164577
The title of this article is no mistake. Anyone who has looked at the FreshMarker Random plugin recently will probably have discovered the new sentence and paragraph built-ins. These two bilt-ins support the library with the generation of the famous Lorem Ipsum pseudo-texts. Without delving deep into history, the Lorem Ipsum texts are a corruption of a Cicero text and serve as dummy texts.
The moment is a wonderful thing, but not for software developers, because it keeps on moving. How can you write a test if the value changes with every test run? Functionality has always been an abomination that concealed some form of now. In FreshMarker, for example, this little monster can be found in the built-in variable .now.