Thoughts on agile software development
FreshMarker allows you to overload a wide variety of operators for your own model types. These operators are multiplication, addition, negation and comparison operators. For strings, the addition operator + has so far been overloaded to realize a string concatenation. In this blog post, we want to implement comparison operators for strings.
For the next version of FreshMarker, a number of new options will be created for the template engine. These new possibilities include the Spaceship Operator and a new String Concatenation Operator.
The FreshMarker Switch Directive is an unusual representative of its kind. Since it has been implemented according to the possibilities of its syntax description in the CongoCC example source code, it is capable of quite unusual working methods. Some special cases could be processed faster with an optimized version. Therefore, the Switch Directive is optimized for constants in this article.
In the second article on the FreshMarker Compiler, we looked at the implementation of a pretty printer for Template instances. This implementation serves as the basis for the FreshMarker Compiler, which generates Java code from a Template instance. Before we tackle the Compiler, we need to look at a few more hurdles and details.
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.
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 a Reddit forum, a suggestion was made to support template fragments in FreshMarker. Template fragments are parts of a template that can be used individually. The question that naturally arises is why would you want to use parts of a template individually? After all, many template engines offer the option of construct a template from different sources using include instructions. Such an include can then also be used individually.
Sometimes a new feature also needs to be a bit of fun. When updating the FreshMarker Grammar, I noticed that the operators lt, gt, gte and lte were still present. These are variants of the usual <, >, <= and >= operators and are reminiscent of the opcodes of a long-forgotten era when assembler languages still roamed the steppes of programming. Since FreshMarker was given its Unicode capabilities by CongoCC, the question arose as to why not allow ≠ and other operator characters in the template.
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.
FreshMarker is an embedded Java template engine that focusses on extensibility and simplicity. For this reason, every implementation of an extension is associated with weighing up its pros and cons. For a long time, the import directive therefore remained an unrealised feature.