Generic Tools contain a collection of reusable and well documented tools of general interest..

Emphasis is being put on providing tool documentation that is suitable for template designers. To achive this goal, a documentation format has been defined that captures all information relevant to the template designer. It is being supplied in addition to the customary Javadoc. This should help to achieve what we always claim for Velocity: "Decouple the work of template designers from the work of software developers". Look at the Struts MessageTool for a good example of the new documentation format.

We are interested in Designer and Developer feedback on the format.

Contributions of generic tools are welcome, see below for more details.

Generic Tools:

DateTool

A tool for manipulating and formating dates.

MathTool

A tool for performing floating point math.

IteratorTool

A convenience tool to use with #foreach loops. It wraps a list to let the designer specify a condition to terminate the loop, and reuse the same list in different loops.

RenderTool

A tool to evaluate and render arbitrary strings of VTL (Velocity Template Language).

We welcome your contributions to this library. Please post your offer to contribute a tool to the Velocity mailing list.

Checklist for Contributions

• Velocity coding conventions
• JavaDoc included (the more detailed the better)
• Examples included (in JavaDoc or as stand-alone template example)