New Velocity Powered Site

[Eric Fixler <fi...@smete.org>]

Hello all.  I site I developed for the Exploratorium in San Francisco  
just went public.  It aims to make digital assets that the  
Exploratorium holds available to teachers. The url is http:// 
nsdl.exploratorium.edu/nsdl/

It's a Struts-Velocity project, but there's a couple of neat (to me,  
at least) Velocity-related features that aren't necessarily apparent...

- The assets are stored in a Cumulus Media Asset database.  This is a  
proprietary DB that has an SDK that one can use to retrieve records,  
iterators, and other data and metadata.  The SDK in no way conforms  
to the Java Bean spec, so I created a set of custom Uberspects so  
that adapts the SDK hooks to the JavaBean (and java.util.Iterator)  
spects so that information about the records can be easily displayed  
inside templates using standard $var.propertyName notation

We also use the LuceneDocumentUberspect that I posted about on the  
wiki and here awhile back, for the same reason.

- The site also hosts an OAI-PMH server -- this is an XML-over-HTTP  
based protocol for interlibrary communication -- whose responses
are constructed with Velocity templates.

I've really enjoyed using velocity, and plan to continue doing so.   
The project was really successful in dealing with the designer/html  
writer/programmer divide, much better than any other template  
language that I've used.  (The only really annoying things were  
difficulty controlling whitespace in space-sensitive settings,  
especially with velocimacros, and the need for some beefing up of the  
native iterator (a hasNext() method of some sort would be really  
useful, if not a full-on for(;;) construct) )

Unfortunately, I don't expect them to put the Velocity bug on the  
site, but it'd be great to have this in the Powered by Velocity  
listings.

If anyone has any questions about the site, please feel free to  
contact me off-list. And thanks to everyone (especially on the dev  
list, and +++ to Shinobu) who helped me out by answering questions  
and such...

best
eric



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