Re: XML Templating Engine - Next steps?

[Reinhard Poetz <re...@yahoo.de>]

Bertrand Delacretaz wrote:
> Le 1 nov. 04, à 17:30, Reinhard Poetz a écrit :
> 
>> After a lot of mails talking about expression languages and templating 
>> enginges I try to summarize the current state of our discussion.  I 
>> see following requirements so far (in brackets you find the name of 
>> the person that brought up the requirement):..
> 
> 
> Just to be clear: we're talking about the templating language used to 
> generate XML out of (usually flowscript) data, right?

yes

> I'm asking (although I know ;-) because the requirements of a *final 
> presentation" templating system might be fairly different - at present 
> the mainstream way (AFAIK) is to use XSLT to generate HTML, WML or 
> whatever, but for many people "templating" in the context of a webapp 
> means roughly "edit pages with DreamWeaver, put some special codes and 
> let the templating engine insert the data".
> 
> Maybe we should call JXTemplate our "XML templating engine" to avoid any 
> confusion.

good idea.

> 
>> ...So, how do we continue to meet all these requirements?
>>
>>  A.) Rewrite/refactor JXTemplate
>>      - break it up in smaller, easier understandable/maintainable pieces
>>      - deprecate #{} syntax and make expression languages plugable as
>>        Sylvain suggested
>>      - investigate the performance problems (I guess there are only
>>        problems if macros are used)
>>      - add the missing things from above...
> 
> 
> Sounds good if people are willing to do it.

;-)
at least we have a common understanding.

> 
> Don't know enough about the other options, but I like this idea:
> 
>> ...In my opinion we should write JXTemplate 2.0 which would be from 
>> the user's POV as similar as possible to 1.0.
>> Technically this could be a complete rewrite (use garbage, tempo or 
>> really from scratch) or at least a major refactoring...
> 
> 
> It would be (of course) good to include automated tests as well, using 
> anteater for example, as this is a critical component

yes, very important

> 
>>
>> Calling it JXTemplate is better for marketing reasons because it shows 
>> more stability than telling our user base that they should use 
>> something completly different in the future. Calling it differently 
>> gives another impression than incrementing version numbers.
> 
> +1

-- 
Reinhard