Thoughts on agile software development
While designing a new feature, I once again stumbled upon a feature of the template language that I haven’t liked for a long time. The syntax of the directives is modeled after HTML elements, not XML elements. As long as you don’t want to change the syntax of the template language, this isn’t a problem. But if you have a great idea for a new feature, you’re in for a world of trouble.
One of the most useful optimizations in FreshMarker is partial reduction: templates can be partially evaluated in advance if part of the model is already known. Until now, however, partial reduction had a blind spot—List directives with ranges (1..4, 4..1, 1..) were ignored during reduction and passed through as simple, non-reducing fragments. This changes with version 2.7.0.
In the FreshMarker template engine, hashes are a central data structure. Hashes access data via a name. Up until version 2.6.0, FreshMarker only supported hashes that used strings as names. Hashes that allow enums as names now exist, but their integration is far from complete.
When replicating the concepts of another template engine, there are always moments when you put off working on a particular concept. This rarely has anything to do with the complexity of the concept itself, but often stems from a personal aversion. For FreshMarker, this has meant that some concepts have been implemented late or completely reworked. Some concepts are still awaiting implementation. One of these concepts is the parameters of the nested directive, which will be implemented for FreshMarker 2.7.0.
The FreshMarker Template Language provides two operators for concatenating string values: the string concatenation operators + and ~. Both operators produce a string from their two operands. The difference between the two operators lies in the way the strings are joined together. The unique feature of the ~ operator leads us to the new general concatenation operator.
Some implementations aren’t based on clever technical tricks, but rather on sheer diligence. That’s why it took FreshMarker Astro quite a while to finally figure out which side of the world a template engine instance is currently located on. The following article describes how FreshMarker Astro managed to get out of this predicament and almost always guesses the hemisphere correctly.
FreshMarker is based on the concepts of another template engine. This is evident from its directives, interpolations, and, of course, its name. Another detail also betrays its origins. The types in the FreshMarker Template Language for collections are sequences and hashes. Hashes represent mappings from strings to values. We now want to relax this restriction.
Just in time for Easter time there is a new FreshMarker release available. There are some more enhancements to the built-ins through the addition of an easy lambda support.
Vor vier Jahren begann das Abenteuer FreshMarker mit dem Blog-Beitrag „FreshMarker, eine frische Template Engine für Java“. Was als akademisches Experiment startete, hat sich inzwischen zu einer vielseitigen und stabilen Template Engine entwickelt. Mit Version 2.5.0 und insgesamt 87 Blog-Beiträgen, die verschiedenste Aspekte beleuchten, ist nun der richtige Zeitpunkt für ein Resümee.
Some time ago, I had the idea that a checksum calculation could be added to the FreshMarker File library. FreshMarker File is an extension for FreshMarker to support the Java types File and Path. A checksum support would allow the current checksum to be added to lists of files without any major detours. The idea is quite simple. A corresponding built-in is appended behind a file or path variable.