Sunday 21 February 2010

Bringing WebMacro up for air

WebMacro was the first OpenSource community that I followed, so I love it and still feel a sense of hurt that licensing issues meant that Velocity had to be born.

On top of that I have quite a few WebMacro templates around, and anyway the world needs more than one templating engine.

However, WebMacro went the way of all flesh: The original author moved on, the push to version 1.0 was slow, and I for one stopped following every thread. Versioning was a real mess; (which was more recent 1.0b or 1.0?) Then came the painful, acrid push to 2.0.

I have revisited a few times, cleaning the code of warnings, ensuring tests continue to pass, even regenerating with new versions of javacc.

However what was really needed was a restructuring of the source tree to align with Maven conventions and a thorough cleanout.

The only way to do that used to be to backup the CVS tree, restructure and then ask a SF admin to recreate the repository, which was too big a hurdle.

Recently (well some time in the last ten years) SF have introduced adminrepo, which enables you to lock a repository, restructure it and then replace:

ssh -t timp,webmacro@shell.sourceforge.net create
adminrepo --checkout cvs
cd /cvsroot/webmacro/webmacro
mkdir src/main
mkdir src/main/java
mv src/org src/main/java
cd ~
adminrepo --save cvs
exit


By this means I was able to move current code into the places Maven expects them and move non-core code out to ../contrib.

Then I upgraded from Doug Lea's venerable Concurrent to his java.util.concurrent.

Thanks to a message from Brian Goetz himself I was able to surmount the only real hickup: EDU.oswego.cs.dl.util.concurrent.ClockDaemon becomes java.util.concurrent.ScheduledExecutorService.

Now WebMacro had only one compile-time dependency: the logging system. On inspection it seems that WebMacro's own logging (yes its has a complete logging system built in) should be ripped out in favour of slf4j.

WebMacro 2.2 should be back in the swim.

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