-------- Velocity -------- Welcome to Velocity. Velocity is a general purpose template engine written in Java. For more information about Velocity, please look at the HTML documentation in the docs/ directory, as well as the Velocity web site http://velocity.apache.org/index.html Here is a description of what each of the top level directories contains. Please consult the documentation in each of the lower level directories for information that is specific to their contents. bin/ This is a temporary build directory. build/ This is where the build scripts live. contrib/ The home for source code which is not officially maintained. convert/ The WebMacro to Velocity conversion program. docs/ This is where the documentation lives. examples/ This is where the examples live. src/ This is where all of the source code to Velocity lives. test/ This is where all of the tests live. whiteboard/ The place for developer experimentation (unmaintained). xdocs/ This is the .xml files for building the .html files related to the website and documentation. REQUIREMENTS ------------ Velocity will run with any version of Java greater than 1.3. Build Velocity requires Java version 1.4 (or greater) and ant 1.6. INCLUDED PRE-BUILT JARS ----------------------- If you are using an offical Velocity release distribution, you will find two pre-built Velocity jars in the top level directory. PLEASE NOTE : Starting with the 1.2 release, we include two jars with the distribution. 1) velocity-.jar : The Velocity jar that does not include any external dependencies needed by Velocity, such as the jakarta-commons-collection classes, Jakarta Avalon Logkit, or Jakarta ORO. We do this to allow you to use whatever version of collections, logkit, etc that you wish w/o fear of collision. These jars are included in the distribution, in the build/lib directory, or at the respective project sites. 2) velocity-dep-.jar : This is a Velocity jar that includes all dependencies that were included with previous distribution jars. It is intended as a convenience to allow you to drop this 1.3 distribution in place of existing 1.1 or 1.2-dep distributions. Please see the developers guide for more information. BUILDING VELOCITY ----------------- In order to use the latest version of Velocity, you may want to build it. Building Velocity is easy. All components necessary to build Velocity are included, except for the Java 2 SDK and the fabulous Ant build tool. You can find details on how to build Velocity online at: http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/build.html Note that you must use Ant version 1.6 or later. To build Velocity's jar, change directory into the build/ directory and simply type : ant jar This will create a bin/ directory containing the Velocity .jar file. Be sure to update your classpath to include Velocity's .jar file, or when using a modern servlet container, put it in the WEB-INF/lib directory. If you wish to build a Velocity jar that contains all dependencies, we have provided an optional build target for our convenience : ant jar-dep This will build a complete Velocity jar with dependencies included, and it can be found in the /bin directory as velocity-dep-.jar TRYING THE EXAMPLES ------------------- After building Velocity, you can also buld the examples that are included with the Velocity distribution. These examples show how to use Velocity in your Java applications and Servlets. There also are examples of how to use Anakia, a XML transformation engine. For more information, please see the README.txt in the examples/ directory. -The Velocity Team