Mechanical Turk / Cmd line tools / Qualification / #set and #foreach in xml

Question

Hi, in Amazon Mechanical Turk command line tools (I have aws-mturk-clt-1.3.0), in one of the samples (site_filter_qual: "Website Filtering Qualification", file site_filter_qual.question), there is code looking something like this:

#set( $urls = [ "http://news.bbc.co.uk/", http://..., ...])

#foreach ( $url in $urls )
...

I am wondering :

• a) what is the language used here(it's not Perl and not PHP, right?);
• b) where (on Amazon site or elsewhere) I could read ab. these constructs;
• c) how to implement tuples (pairs), e.g.

// in Python:

>> data = [("http://news.bbc.com", "NEWS"), ("http://google.com", "SEARCH"), ...]
>> for (url, category) in data:
>>     ....

-- or something similar?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It's a Velocity template (part of the Apache project). The good news is that it's a reasonably flexible language that you can manipulate. The better news is that you can (since I believe all the CLT and SDK code is open) actually create new constructs to override or expand on anything that's not part of Velocity out-of-the-box.

To answer your questions directly:

a) Velocity

b) http://velocity.apache.org/

c) You can use two separate arrays. Not pretty, I realize, but it'll work.