[seade]

There are a number of frameworks that utilise Jakarta Velocity as their templating engine. There are a couple of plugins available for editing these files, but it would be great to integrate Velocity support into the ME HTML editor. Existing plugns are:

http://veloedit.sourceforge.net/ – source is available from sf.net, no updates for over a year.
http://propsorter.sourceforge.net/veloeclipse/ – source is not available.

Cheers,
Scott

[Riyad Kalla]

Scott,
What kind of support do you want to see? Just the templating autocomplete in the HTML editor? What about JSP files? XML Files? etc?

[seade]

I am an Apache Jakarta Turbine user (and committer BTW) so I tend to code numerous *.vm files that contain fragments of html with embedded velocity (more often than not it is actually the other way around). While I do not use it, there is a tag library available that provides for using velocity within JSP (http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/veltag.html) and as you may also know velocity can be used to generate just about anything (e.g. ME uses it for Hibernate code generation, Apache DB Torque also uses it for Java and SQL generation).

In terms of functionality, the Veloeclipse plugin adds some useful functionality to that provided by Veloedit including html syntax highlighting and a preview mode. I would also like to see:

the ability to specify if tabs or spaces should be used for indentation
optional macro file validation – ensure a macro is defined before it is used
variations on preview that show:

the generated source with the velocity statements (VTL) actually evaluated
the generated source with VTL evaluated rendered as html (often just a fragment)

the ability to store a library of String replacements for references for use in the previews
the potential to use mock objects as replacements for variable references for use when evaluating properties and references for rendering previews
code formatting
provision for and ability to switch between html and velocity outlines
ability to check the html source preview as being well-formed xml or validity as an xhtml fragment

There is plenty that could be done to improve VTL coding under Eclipse. VTL evaluation in the preview would provide a massive leap in productivity.

Thanks for listening,

Scott

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