FreeMarker-based text file PreProcessor Version 0.9.13

Page contents

• What is FMPP?
• Features
• Documentation
• Download
• Project State
• Contact

What is FMPP?

FMPP is a general-purpose text file preprocessor tool that uses FreeMarker templates. It is particularly designed for HTML preprocessor, to generate complete (static) homepages: directory structure that contains HTML-s, image files, etc. But of course it can be used to generate source code or whatever text files. FMPP is extendable with Java classes to pull data from any data sources (database, etc.) and embed the data into the generated files.

FMPP can be used with UN*X-style command-line interface, or as Ant task, or you can embed it into your Java application.

FMPP is 100% Java, thus it runs on all modern platforms (Windows, "Linux", Mac OS X, Solaris, ...etc.).

FMPP is Free software. See the license here...

Some products that were created for similar purpose to FMPP: Template Toolkit (Perl), PPWizard (Rexx), VPP (Java, Velocity)

Features

This is a quick list of FMPP capabilities:

• Preprocessor language (it is the FreeMarker Template Language):
  • All the usual template constructs, such as include, if/else/elseif, loop.
  • Macros with named arguments and nested content (body).
  • Variables (global, or local for a macro call)
  • Complex expressions using string, arithmetical and logical operations. Extensible with custom functions.
  • Automatic and manual escaping (HTML, XML, custom function)
  • Transforming (filtering) blocks of output; extensible with custom transformations in Java.
  • Capturing block of output into a variable.
  • Charset aware, internally uses UNICODE.
  • Number and date/time formatting with masks (patterns). Locale sensitive number and date/time formatting.
• Bulk file processing:
  • Process entire directories recursively.
  • Different file processing mode can be chosen for each file, based on path patterns (as file extension): execute file as template, or parse it as XML and then render it to output with a template, or binary-copy it, or ignore it.
  • Can ignore bad source files and log the error message into a text file.
  • Can guarantee that certain files will be processed later than others.
• You can expose data from arbitrary data sources be writing extensions in Java. Currently out-of-the-box supported data sources:
  • XML file
  • CSV and tab-separated text files
  • Java "properties" file
  • Ant properties, Ant project and target information
  • System clock
  • Plain text file
• Other highlighted features:
  • Output splitting: a single source file can generate multiple output files (including 0 output files).
  • Automatic file inclusion, automatic escaping, and whatnot that can be done with automatically inserted headers and footers, chosen based on path patterns.
  • Generate HTML <img>-s with calculated width and height.
  • Calculate the relative path to the home directory, or to any other file.
  • Rendering (transforming) XML files with FreeMarker templates. (Similar to the typical XSLT usage pattern.)
  • Query the size/existence of source files.
  • Query output encoding (charset).
  • URL-escaping (with the actual output charset).

Documentation

• FMPP Manual
• FMPP Java API
• FreeMarker Manual
• FreeMarker Java API

Download

To download the latest release, please visit the FMPP homepage : http://fmpp.sourceforge.net/

For text editor and IDE plug-ins, and for other FreeMarker template related tools, please visit the FreeMarker homepage: http://freemarker.org/ or http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/

Project State

Unlike most open source projects, I will be honest about it: I (Dániel Dékány) have stopped the active development of the FMPP project with FMPP 0.9.7. This means that I do bugfixes and other maintenance work (check it here if I really do), so the project is not abandoned. Just, I don't plan to develop new features or do serious reworking. However, contributions of proper quality are welcome and will be integrated.

I believe that the project will serve the FreeMarker community well even if it remains in its current state forever. After all, it's already a feature rich and stable tool (that is, compared to the alternatives I have seen...).

Contact

	Please report bugs you find! Any programming, documentation content or grammatical mistakes, even minor typos. Thank you! Use the bug reporting Web page, or e-mail: [email protected] (delete the "REMOVETHIS"!)
	Please report FreeMarker bugs at the FreeMarker bug reporting Web page, not for me. If you are not sure if you have found a FreeMarker or an FMPP bug, just report it as FMPP bug.
	Also, note the Known Problems page.

Ask help or tell suggestions:

• on the mailing list (The preferred way. Low traffic.):
  • Subscribe/unsubscribe: http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/fmpp-open
  • News group interface: nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.text.fmpp
    
  • Web interface (read only): http://news.gmane.org/thread.php?group=gmane.comp.text.fmpp
• on the SourceForge.net Web forum: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=254571
• with private e-mail: [email protected] (delete the "REMOVETHIS"!)

Home page: http://fmpp.sourceforge.net/

Generated on Dec 16, 2007 10:12 PM GMT For FMPP version 0.9.13