How it was at the first week of coding

Hi there,

Finally, I began to write a code, and as funny sounds, but I really wanted to do it starting from the day, when I was accepted to GSoC! And now, I'm very happy, becuse I have a lot of work, interesting work!

So, what did I do during this week? There were two points on which I was working.
First one of my tasks was creating and testing custom localization tool for a project. In my previous post I sad that custom localization tool is a central (in both meaning of this word) component of the project structure. All magic will be around this component. It accesses resources bundles and obtains messages therein.
So, lets start from fact that I have created this tool. And it was very interesting, as for me, to accomplsih it. So, I'll tell you how to do it.
So, first, that we need, is to extend generic velocity's ResourceTool class. We are doing that to have an opportunity to load resources outside from class path (from /WEB-INF directory, for example). In generic class,  the Object get(Object k, String baseName, Object l) method is responsible for loading resources, and we simply should override him. And everything will be ok. But how to override it method, you can ask me? And I say you, that it's simply! We only should to take care about using of ourappropriate resource loader class instead of default. We just calling:

      getResourceLoader().getFileSystemResource(resourceLocation, baseName, locale);

and passing in the path, where our messages resource for specified locale is situated. It returns ResourceBundle with translated messages for that locale therein.
And, I guess, that it is all that i needed for writting our custom localization tool. All the rest behavior inherit from velocity Resource tool. But it's not enought for using such kind of velocity tool. As you know, for standalone using of any velocity tool we need to configure toolbox, that will contain all tools.
For configuring of such toolbox I used ToolManager and Factory configuration classes. The result of configurstion was velocity tool context, which can be used (merged) with standard velocity context. The code, which configures velocity toolbox is shown below:
        // creating of a manager and factory configuration
        ToolManager velocityToolManager = new ToolManager();
        FactoryConfiguration factoryConfig = new FactoryConfiguration();
       
        ToolboxConfiguration toolbox = new ToolboxConfiguration();
        // we are setting scope for this toolbox as application
        // because we wanna use it for each request
        toolbox.setScope(Scope.APPLICATION);
        // we should configure our custom tool before
        // setting it into toolbox
        ToolConfiguration localizationTool = new ToolConfiguration();
        localizationTool.setClassname(LocalizationTool.class.getName());
       
        localizationTool.setKey("l10n");
        localizationTool.setProperty("locale", new Locale(locale));
        localizationTool.setProperty("bundles", "messages");
        localizationTool.setProperty("resourceLocation", getResourceLocation(locale));
       
        toolbox.addTool(localizationTool);
        // and now we can configure toolbox
        factoryConfig.addToolbox(toolbox);
        velocityToolManager.configure(factoryConfig);
        toolContext = velocityToolManager.createContext();

And further, I've "merged" this toolConext with velocity context, which had allowed us to use configured tool directly within our templates:

        VelocityContext velocityContext = new VelocityContext(toolContext );

You can also to argue to me, "why aren't you using toolbox.xml file for configuring tool?" for example. Relax. Using of such approach in this case isn't acceptable, because we are targeted to the best performance, and using additional servlet and one more xml file on  file system isn't good for it. With using java code to configure toolbox we are pretty flexible and fast. Moreover, in our case (we are tied to servlet's filters) we can use only standalone variant of velocity toolbox (without VelocityViewServlet, which, nevertheless, great simplifies using of toolbox).
Well now, this is just enough for creating custom localization tool. What was the second of my tasks for this week? It was creating of new page for selecting preferred language as first step of setup wizard.

This page should be as much as simply. So, I added only few components onto it (i.e. selection list for choosing language, checkbox for indicationg that it's need to remeber user's choise and button for continue as next arrow).  But anyway it looks good and has enough functionality, as other suchlike pages.

I think, that is enough for this time, if anybody has a question, I'm ready to tell you what you want,

With best wishes, Taras Chorny!