Velocity 1.4 Released

JohnA writes "After what seemed to be a 30 year beta period, the Apache Jakarta team has made available the final release version of Velocity 1.4. If you're not familiar with Velocity, it's one of the most powerful and popular templating engines around. And, as an added bonus, a DreamWeaver plugin was also released."

Comments

Why?

[forsetti]

Why do we need an alternative to JSP, that also works in a Java environment? I understand the use of JSP as an alternative to PHP or ASP (3 different platforms), but I don't understand why I need two solutions to (seemingly) the same problem on the same platform. Could someone enlighten me?

It's Not by Design

[arthurs_sidekick]

JSP is not *designed* to produce crappy code, even if a lot of people produce crappy code with it. Hell, the same goes for PHP, although the latter's genesis as an HTML-embedded language does, I believe, expose it to that sort of charge.

There are reasons for servlet forwarding and tag libraries; they let you do the heavy lifting in servlets and tag handlers, and just handle display in JSPs.

I say this as the author of several JSPs (some deployed in production on reasonably high-profile sites) with buttloads of spaghetti-code, static Java blocks, and their own methods(!). I did it all out of ignorance of the true power of the tools the Serlvet spec designers put in my hands. It's an education issue more than a spec design issue.

Of course, there is that undercurrent among Java developers that suggests if the language permits a certain practice, it encourages it. That's what you get for designing a "B&D" language =)