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20031002 Thursday October 02, 2003

Packaging Velocity I've made a number of changes to struts-menu this week, and it now supports the ability to render menus via Velocity templates. This allows for easy customization and basically allows for you to create any type of navigation system you want (i.e. drop-downs, tabs, plain ol' links) etc. One of the issues I'm wrestling with is how should I package Velocity with the distribution. Usually, to integrate struts-menu into a Struts-based application, you only need to include struts-menu.jar. Now, if you want to use Velocity for your menus, you must include velocity.jar and velocity-tools.jar in your application's WEB-INF/lib. I think most users will accept this.

However, in the example app, there's a velocity.properties file and a couple example templates. This seems like an opportunity for many users to forget to include these - so I'm wondering what's the best way to package these. Should I put velocity.properties in the source tree, and initialize my VelocityMenuDisplayer using that? Should I do a check to see if the user has their own velocity.properites in WEB-INF/classes for an optional override?

Another question is should I put the sample templates (simple.html and coolmenus.html so far) in the source tree, and then use Velocity to load them from the struts-menu.jar file? Or should I package them in a menu-templates.jar file?

Basically, it all boils down to this question: If you have a project (.jar) that depends on Velocity and plugs into web applications - what is the best way to distribute your Velocity settings?

BTW, I hope to make an effort to decouple this library from Struts someday - shouldn't be too hard. Posted in Java at Oct 02 2003, 03:38:32 PM MDT 3 Comments

Comments:

After your elation with the Power Book, I went and bought my own tonight. the 12 inch, I love it. It's my first Apple, well, since my Apple 2 e ;) Thank you.

Posted by Marc Adams on October 02, 2003 at 08:21 PM MDT #

Awesome - congrats Marc! I'm loving my 17" bad boy. I never thought I'd say this but - someone asked me today how I liked it, and I actually said it was <em>fast</em>. This thing really does rock. I can't wait until my next project, I'm going to make an attempt to make it my primary development machine. A little IDEA love might be required to make that happen though. Anyway - have fun - you're gonna love it - and the network of enthusiasts.

My first piece of advice? Get NetNewsWire for reading blogs (lots of cool options under the View menu). Also, check out these OS X customization tips.

Posted by Matt Raible on October 02, 2003 at 08:47 PM MDT #

Thanks Matt, I would love a little IDEA love myself. Bit pricy though eh? I appreciate all the links, I am going to need all the help I can get acclimating to os x.

Posted by Marc Adams on October 03, 2003 at 09:53 AM MDT #

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