Slashdot Mirror
Jakarta Velocity Tools 1.0 Released
Nathan Bubna writes "Jakarta Velocity Tools is a newly released project from the Apache Software Foundation. It provides servlets and tools for rapid, clean, MVC web development with Velocity, tools for using Velocity
with the Jakarta Struts framework, and a set of generic tools to help with any Velocity project."
Absolutely!
I'm leading a team of developers using Velocity for a large e-Business application, with many modules. It's a beauty to use, and our solution has won a few awards last year. We use a custom framework (not Struts, not VelocityServlet) to choose templates to load, since our app is designed to be highly customizable for each of our customers (medium or large business, including government). We also keep the locale in the session, and load the appropriate localized Velocity template if available. Let's just say this app is quite large. We now have well over a thousand Velocity templates, built up over the last few years.
Unfortunately I'm not at liberty to identify the application or the company here, because the company is actually very much a Microsoft shop, and it's been a major political issue that I've had our team move our application away from Microsoft solutions (it used to be VB/ASP). But it's performed well and never let us down (although the 1.3 release of Velocity was quite buggy and we had to revert to 1.2 until 1.3.1 came out).
I would wholeheartedly recommend Velocity. I had our team start using it because we ran into a huge mess with ASP (which I knew would repeat with JSP). Enforcing code separation between your view and your model is important, and Velocity does it beautifully. It avoids having a lot of unnecessary (and unmaintainable) cruft mixed in with your HTML.
If you need more specific information, we can discuss it by email. I'll be happy to help you in any way that I can.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
I've used both and the conclusion is (at least for me) that I like JSTL (and Taglibs in general) more.
While Velocity provides for a clean separation of logic and presentation, so do taglibs with the added benefit that they are *much* easier on the webdesigner, and there is tool support to render them during design phase. Besides that, there *has* to be logic in the presentation, namely presentation logic. The backend gives a damn how a number has to be formatted, or from which resources actual pieces of text come. Taglibs provide a rich set of features to accomplish this. I'm also very fond of available third-party taglibs with a clean mechanism for using and incorporating them.
Of course this can be done with velocity too in the form of helper beans, but I find the tag approach much easier and cleaner.
I don't need a tool that forces separation upon me, I do it out of my own accord. Everything possible with Velocity can be done in Taglibs, and I believe with the backing JSP receives it's the more future oriented approach. Chances are that you are able to hire guns proficient in Taglibs and JSP, at least more so than Velocity... if only for the vast amount of resources like books and tutorials on offer for JSP.
My bet is on JSTL and Tablibs, altough I've used templating systems (Webmacro, Freemarker, Velocity, HTML::Template...) extensively and grew quite fond of them.