Velocity for interactive applications

[Carlos M Rodriguez]

Hi folks:

I had a couple of quick questions (actually, mainly one question) I was hoping someone with knowledge of Velocity could answer.

From what I have been reading, Velocity essentially provides a markup or template language which is then consumed by an engine which can then fill in the references and conditional statements to generate HTML by using the declared references to java objects. Which essentially means that, like a JSP, this is all stuff that happens before the page is rendered.

Does Velocity (or its related projects) support any client->java method mapping, or any action mapping at all? I'm looking for the kind of functionality where the framework provides you with either an automatic mapping or establishes conventions that make mapping mouseclicks to java method calls (maybe involving AJAX, maybe not) easy.

-carlos

[David Newton]

Mouse clicks? Velocity doesn't even know what a mouse *is*, so without knowing more, I don't really know how to answer your question. JSP doesn't know what a mouse is either--both take a context and a template and make text out of it. What are you really trying to do?

[Carlos M Rodriguez]

Maybe I should have explained myself in simpler terms, but I just needed to know if Velocity had any facilities to send UI events to the java side from the Javascript side (action mappings, command mapping, what have you, think Wicket, DWR, JSF, etc). But it has become clear to me that this is completely outside the scope for Velocity.

Thank you.

[David Newton]

Correct. Since it can create anything, you could obviously wrap that stuff up, but there's certainly nothing out of the box.