FTL WYSIWYG Editor?

[zezom]

Hi Guys,
I was hoping that some one might know of a WYSIWYG editor that can handle the freemarker (ftl) language. I tried Dreamweaver but it didn't understand what to do with the tags so it just displayed them on the page as text. Is there a WYSIWYG editor that can integrate with Alfresco for easier Web Script development? If it could understand the relationship of the JavaScript files that would be even better.

Thanks,
Ryan Thorburn.

[zezom]

Also, if there isn't a WYSIWYG that does what I was after. What other techniques do people use to speed up the creation and maintenance of the html part of their web scripts? Do you create the layout in something like Dreamweaver and then add the ftl code after? I'm curious to know. So far I have hand coded everything in notepad++ and I'm thinking that there has to be a faster way.

[mikeh]

The two editors I know that have FTL parsers are: Eclipse and TextMate. I prefer the latter.

Thanks,
Mike

[lfridael]

Well, to be honest, FTL is just a templating language for generating markup, and in this respect is practically identical in purpose to JSP, ASP, PHP, etc. So the usual techniques apply: factor out common parts (headers and footers being the most obvious examples) into reusable fragments that can be used through a straight <#include> or called using a <#macro>.

I'm not aware of any editor that has semantic awareness of FTL syntax, if that's what you're looking for. There's a Freemarker plugin for Eclipse that basically provides syntax highlighting and some code templating. It didn't work very well for me, at least not when I tried it a few months ago. (The syntax highlighting for ${expressions} didn't always seems to be in sync with what I was typing.)

(There's a Freemarker bundle for TextMate, which is what I use, but that only applies if you're on a Mac and it seems  you're on Windows, since you mentioned Notepad++.)