Project work sometimes require manual (and hence boring) tasks such as creating test data, transforming files and creating documentation - we strive to minimise those manual tasks and see them as an opportunity to hone our development skills.
We worked a lot with Apache FreeMarker in the past since it is fast, has a lot of functionality, awesome documentation and no external dependencies - but we missed a ready-to-use Command Line Interface to do things more efficiently.
In the spirit of Open Source Software we considered this more of a challenge than an actual problem and we started an in-house pet project (called Veloovy back than)
- Started with Apache Velocity and Groovy
- Moved from Apache Velocity to Apache FreeMarker
- Migrated from Groovy to plain JDK
- Migrated from Apache Commons CLI to Picocli
After 5 years we decided that this pet project deserves a better future and contributed it to the Apache FreeMarker community - so our nice pet project started a second life at the Apache FreeMarker Generator project.