Thoughts on agile software development
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.
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.
The topic of randomness has visited this blog several times. There was a post about the Voses algorithm and random values in JUnit 5 Test. So why not provide random values in FreshMarker. Since random values are rarely needed in templates, this extension is not realized in FreshMarker itself, but in a separate plugin. In addition, this is a good opportunity to demonstrate the FreshMarker plugin mechanism.
Internationalization, or I18N for short, is a skill that every modern software must master. Long gone are the days when software could only offer an English only interface. Localizable values such as dates and numbers can always be output in FreshMarker using the language-specific formatter. The situation is different with terms that need to be adapted to the language of the document.
In the last article on FreshMarker Ranges, the Right-limited Exclusive Ranges and Length-limited Ranges were introduced. They were not part of the FreshMarker Ranges support for quite some time. Previously, it was only possible to create regular ranges with the Length-limited Ranges syntax, i.e. ranges that represent monotonically increasing sequences. The reason is simply illustrated … Read more