Contributions?

[jp...@seznam.cz]

Freemarker has been quite helpful in the medical documents product I am 
working on.

Is there an issue you would recommend for a new contributor who wants to 
learn the code?

Two issues interest me in particular:
  Java 8 Time Support 
  Debugging and testing tools for people who write templates. 

Also not clear on whether it's better to contribute to Freemarker 2 or 3.

Thanks

Re: Contributions?

[Daniel Dekany <dd...@apache.org>]

Wednesday, January 31, 2018, 8:02:30 AM, jprice@seznam.cz wrote:

> Freemarker has been quite helpful in the medical documents product I am
> working on.
>
> Is there an issue you would recommend for a new contributor who wants to
> learn the code?
>
> Two issues interest me in particular:
>   Java 8 Time Support 
>   Debugging and testing tools for people who write templates. 

There's a list of ideas on
https://freemarker.apache.org/contribute.html. Java 8 time API support
is one of them. Though it's far from the easiest thing to do, you can
always give it a try.

> Also not clear on whether it's better to contribute to Freemarker 2 or 3.

Depends on what your goal/motivation is.

- If you want to use your work in a product in the foreseeable future,
  then FM 2 is the only option. (However, anything that goes into 2
  should be forward ported to 3, at least eventually.)

- If you rather want to help FM's long term future, or want to
  hack/learn something in general, like solve some interesting
  problems, then FM3 it is. 3 is already cleaner than 2, and there are
  no backward compatibility constraints (which is a big problem in 2),
  more space for innovation, so it's a much more satisfying branch to
  work on. But 3 won't yield a production-ready release any time soon.
  The most important changes in the template language wasn't even
  started yet.

> Thanks

-- 
Thanks,
 Daniel Dekany