Jelly Status

[Ken McCloskey <ke...@hotmail.com>]

I'm quite eager to use Jelly, but I find the installation to be difficult 
and the documentation to be thin and unhelpful. One of the reasons I believe 
Ant has been so successful is that you can download it, install it, and use 
it in a matter of minutes. No lost time, no frustration.

Many of the dependencies required to build Jelly are not on ibiblio, for 
example.

Before I invest any more time into it, I'd like to know whether there is 
still a serious ongoing development effort in Jelly.

Ken

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Re: Jelly Status

[Bill Keese <bi...@tech.beacon-it.co.jp>]

> I'd like to know whether there is
> still a serious ongoing development effort in Jelly.

Unfortunately I have the same concerns; I submitted some patches to
commons-dev mailing list weeks ago without any response (yet), which is even
scarier.  Same thing with some other people that submitted patches.  I think
the owners of the Jelly are involved in many things and are thus very busy,
but still...

As for documentation, you need to (use CVS to) check out the code and then
look at all the examples in the java/test directories.  I also have a number
of notes I've written which I can send you or post here, if you are
interested.

Also, I agree that the stuff on ibiblio is incomplete, and also very old,
although I'm not sure if that is a Jelly problem or a general problem.
(Specifically regarding updates not on ibiblio, the HTTPClient has had some
important changes, such as URL-encoding.  And Dom4J has had some important
fixes regarding namespaces.)

I'm not sure what the alternative is though.  Ant is great but it is a build
system, not a scripting language, and therefore it is missing many important
things for scripting, such as (mutable) variables.  I also like XSLT as a
language (it is very elegant), but it is not a scripting language either.
Also, you should see
http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2003/06/10/jython.html , although I don't
necessarily agree with the article personally.

Bill

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ken McCloskey" <ke...@hotmail.com>
To: <co...@jakarta.apache.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 8:15 AM
Subject: Jelly Status


> I'm quite eager to use Jelly, but I find the installation to be difficult
> and the documentation to be thin and unhelpful. One of the reasons I
believe
> Ant has been so successful is that you can download it, install it, and
use
> it in a matter of minutes. No lost time, no frustration.
>
> Many of the dependencies required to build Jelly are not on ibiblio, for
> example.
>
> Before I invest any more time into it, I'd like to know whether there is
> still a serious ongoing development effort in Jelly.
>
> Ken
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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> http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail
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Re: Jelly Status

[Paul Libbrecht <pa...@activemath.org>]

I agree the installation (and running) is painful, I've been thinking of 
a Webstart-based jelly-launcher which would help greatly, I think but 
had no time doing it.

In the meantime, I think a usable approach is to use directly maven to 
run jelly: for each jelly file, you have a project.xml (probably pretty 
dumb, but stating dependencies!), a maven.xml doing all you want... and 
probably some related files...

As of the non-up-to-date of the maven repository, I think it's simple 
enough to use maven to build the tag-libs you want (source from 
repository) and build so far as the plug-in is installed in your repository.

Might I recommend, however, that a distribution of jelly is made 
somewhere that contains most of the tag-libs ? At least those having 
dependencies that can be honoured by ibiblio ?

Certainly, the jelly development, however, would enjoy some responsible 
for the taglibs or a fair amount of them. I am not the influencer or 
decider but it really looks like it's needed.

Paul


Ken McCloskey wrote:
> I'm quite eager to use Jelly, but I find the installation to be 
> difficult and the documentation to be thin and unhelpful. One of the 
> reasons I believe Ant has been so successful is that you can download 
> it, install it, and use it in a matter of minutes. No lost time, no 
> frustration.
> 
> Many of the dependencies required to build Jelly are not on ibiblio, for 
> example.
> 
> Before I invest any more time into it, I'd like to know whether there is 
> still a serious ongoing development effort in Jelly.
> 
> Ken

Re: Jelly Status

[Peter Royal <pr...@apache.org>]

On Wednesday, June 18, 2003, at 07:15  PM, Ken McCloskey wrote:
> Before I invest any more time into it, I'd like to know whether there 
> is still a serious ongoing development effort in Jelly.

I know its used. I'll push on the dev list to see if a release can be 
pushed for.
-pete