HotWax Media has once again been collaborating with other open source projects to get bugs fixed and out to the communities of OFBiz and other complimentary projects. Much like we did with Groovy last winter, we have been actively working with the Freemarker community.
Freemarker is a popular Open Source “template engine”: a generic tool to generate text output based on templates.
It is an important component of the Apache OFBiz framework because a great portion of the user interfaces is built using Freemarker templates.
One year ago, two bugs affecting the latest (at that time) release of Freemarker (2.3.19), and relevant for the way it is used in OFBiz, were discovered by the OFBiz community and reported to the Freemarker community:
https://sourceforge.net/p/freemarker/bugs/361/
https://sourceforge.net/p/freemarker/bugs/363/
The first one is a deadlock issue that could happen under heavy load (under certain special conditions) and was discovered and fixed by the HotWax Media team; the second one is an issue titled “Wrong overloaded method”, it was reported and fixed by an OFBiz committer and the HWM team helped in writing unit tests, testing, and communication with the Freemarker committers.
The fix for the first bug was finally published in the new Freemarker release 2.3.20; unfortunately the fix for the second bug could not be included in this release and because of this the OFBiz releases had to be packaged with a patched “unofficial” version of Freemarker.
However two weeks ago the Freemarker group announced that a new candidate release package was available that fixes the outstanding bug. They asked us to integrate it into OFBiz and test to confirm that it works as expected: the HWM team played an active role in this process and after a series of successful tests we have committed the new Freemarker jar to the OFBiz trunk.
We are now waiting for the official Freemarker release, which should happen this summer, before publishing it in a new OFBiz release: we will announce it in this blog as soon as it happens so stay tuned!
