Now – GIT site claims that it’s not-needed feature and no one cares about it . I’d like to disagree. Many of myweb projects require temp, sessions, logs cache directories which are usually empty to start with. Now – I can add .gitignore file into that directory to make GIT track it – but it feels like such a hack and also inconveniences clearing these directories before commit. Another workaround for this they say – use build scripts. I’m sorry – but in many cases id’be writing build scripts for the whole purpose of commiting an empty directories – this just wrong. after prolonged hesitation I’ve decided to rather go with mercurial which handles empty dirs antively..

Nathan was claiming it was made 10 years ago. Well, the coding is extremely strange with organization. It is not easy to use and not very flexible. It will work fine as long as you don’t have to use any special characters (that you want displayed and not to disappear with velocity usage) in your template. For example, using a html edit mask where the ## is used in the mask, this will cause a lot of problems for velocity. Yes there are some escape sequences you can do, but they are not very easy to use.

I would vote not to use velocity until they improve it a lot.

Velocity sucks because it was first written over 10 years ago and almost immediately achieved wide adoption. This created a large mass of inertia, people who wanted the latest fixes and improvements but did not want to update their old templates. Further, the original creators made many of these questionable decisions, then actively resisted changing them when newer contributors to the project came along. Those newer contributors (like me), then became accustomed to the quirks and found other things to do besides lobby for fixing them. By the time enough of the old crew was gone to open the way for backwards incompatible changes, there were even more templates and users accustomed to them.

In short, Velocity has most of these issues because it has gone too long without a 2.0 version. However, 2.0 is finally in the works. So, for all those who want to fix these things, NOW is the time to jump in and work for changes to the defaults.

Oh, and you are ignorant about the reasons for some things. Tools like $esc return null in situations like $esc.html($!thisisnull) instead of empty string, because it is very easy and clean to do $!esc.html($thisisnull) and it is very ugly to have to change #if($esc.html($thisisnull)) to something that treats empty string as false correctly. And that’s just the main reason, returning null is also more helpful in debugging tool method calls.

So, while i agree there are some outdated decisions that need to be changed, not everything you call stupid actually is stupid. :)

Cheers!