I recently beccame aware of Alfresco. It looks quite interesting. It came to my attention because I noticed that it seems to make extensive use of FreeMarker, an open source library for which I am largely to blame.
I find it quite gratifying that you find this work useful.
Basically, I'm just posting to ask whether you would like to appear on the "powered by FreeMarker page. http://freemarker.org/poweredBy.html which lists products that use FreeMarker.
FreeMarker has been extremely helpful to us in the development of our templating services. We have developed a powerful object model which works very nicely with the FreeMarker language: http://www.alfresco.org/mediawiki/index.php/Template_Guide FYI I found the object model surprisingly easy to write and the integration to the FreeMarker engine was also pleasant to code due to the well thought out extensibility and plugability of the system.
We would be very happy to appear on the page!
Alfresco intends to make more use FreeMarker in the future. Please let us know of any plans you have for it.
Maybe you could provide me a brief description of the product to appear on the page.
As for future FreeMarker development, you probably have seen that development has slowed down of late. Admittedly some of this is that it has reached a fairly mature state, where the code is robust and probably few users find that it lacks key features they need.
There are some ideas afoot regarding enhancing the macro system. While FreeMarker's macro system is way ahead of competing things in the space, I think, it has some notable holes. Mainly when you have macros that nest naturally (analogous to <ul>..<li>.. in HTML) the macro that occurs in the body of another macro doesn't have easy access to parameters set in the "parent" macro.
My opinion, though, is that the most value-added, at this point, is on the 3rd party tools front. A lot could be done with our eclipse plugin. The original author seems to be too busy to maintain it much. I'm actually kind of interested in learning the eclipse RCP stuff, so maybe I'll do some work on that. The real weak point of FreeMarker wrt competing technologies with more visibility/placement is not in its intrinsic technical merit, but simply in the fact that the people who write IDE's and web dev tools and so on will build in support for JSP, say, and not FreeMarker. Mostly what we can do is provide much better API for tool writers than what we have now. (Whether they write the tools or not then remains to be seen, but we will have done our part.)
In general, we're quite interested in how people are using FreeMarker and whatever issues they are coming across. Alfresco developers and anybody else are free to subscribe to our mailing lists, freemarker-devel and freemarker-user and provide suggestions about future development. (Naturally if a company wanted to sponsor certain pieces of functionality, that would probably get priority…)
