XML News from Tuesday, April 10, 2007

The Apache Velocity team Velocity DocBook Framework 1.0 released "It is intended to help creating high-quality documentation in the Docbook format which can be used online or as PDF for print out." It's not immediately clear what thsi does that the DocBook XSL stylesheets don't.


The Apache Project has also released Velocity Engine 1.5, an open source template engine written in Java. Velocity

permits anyone to use a simple yet powerful template language to reference objects defined in Java code.

When Velocity is used for web development, Web designers can work in parallel with Java programmers to develop web sites according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) model, meaning that web page designers can focus solely on creating a site that looks good, and programmers can focus solely on writing top-notch code. Velocity separates Java code from the web pages, making the web site more maintainable over its lifespan and providing a viable alternative to Java Server Pages (JSPs) or PHP.

Velocity's capabilities reach well beyond the realm of the web; for example, it can be used to generate SQL, PostScript and XML (see Anakia for more information on XML transformations) from templates. It can be used either as a standalone utility for generating source code and reports, or as an integrated component of other systems. For instance, Velocity provides template services for the Turbine web application framework, together resulting in a view engine facilitating development of web applications according to a true MVC model.

Finally, the Apache Project has released VelocityTools 1.3, "a collection of Velocity subprojects with a common goal of creating tools and infrastructure for building both web and non-web applications using the Velocity template engine."