A Wicket Diary

In a previous post, which happens to be high on Google’s search results when looking for OS X drivers and Logitech products, I lamented Logitech’s driver support for not working and mostly keeping quiet about it.

I’ve recently upgraded my MacBook Pro to Leopard and it seems that the freezing problem has been fixed. I haven’t encountered the spinning beach ball of death due to connecting my Logitech headset. But I must confess that I am very cautious currently when attaching the headset, and haven’t used it for a while. I’m slightly optimistic that this problem is solved.

Recently the Wicket team released the first milestone release of Wicket 1.4, the new and Java 5 based release that will supplant Wicket 1.3 rather soon. We have adopted the release schema of Eclipse as our M.O. to smooth the process of introducing (amongst others) generics into our code base.

In the same tradition as Eclipse, we now have our very own New and Noteworthy release document for Wicket 1.4-m1.

Now I hear you ask… How can I help out? Well, you can! By using this milestone release and providing us feedback on how this release suits you.

Enjoy!

Our publisher (Manning) has a special offer on the following books, including Wicket in Action where you get $10 off. Only valid this week, and is only applicable for orders > $20.

Use the code M1210 at checkout.

The following books are part of this deal:

• Zend Framework in Action
• CakePHP in Action
• PHP in Action
• Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja
• jQuery in Action
• Prototype & Scriptaculous in Action
• Ajax in Practice
• RSS & Atom in Action
• Adobe AIR in Action
• Struts 2 in Action
• Wicket in Action
• GWT in Practice
• Groovy in Action
• Algorhythms of the Intelligent Web
• ASP.NET MVC in Action
• ASP.NET AJAX in Action
• Silverlight 2 in Action

Happy reading!

Our friends at the former JavaLobby have written up an interview detailing Wicket’s Ajax implementation. Igor, Jonathan and Eelco provide answers, insight and a glimpse of the future of Wicket Ajax.

When you are away from your open source endeavours for a week or two, you’ll get a big inbox full of messages you need to catch up. There are two ways to tackle the 200+ threads that are waiting for your attention:

1. mark them all read in one go
2. read each message during the course of the week

Using #1 will lead you to miss out on some really great stuff. I was fortunate to use #2 for the Wicket user list: Andrew Broderick wrote on April 15th some really nice praise to the user list:

[T]he inherent ease of splitting things up into components, and the inherent encapsulation that comes with this, has shrunk our development time markedly. It also gives us a high level of confidence in what we’ve built, because once you get something working in isolation, it keeps working wherever you eventually put it. This is, I think, the single biggest benefit it gives us.

And he concludes:

We’ve thrown our site together quickly and under great time pressure, and Wicket has delivered. The inherent type safety you get from building the site from Java classes helps hugely. It means very few run-time bugs. The separation of markup means our web designer can work in the same codebase as our Java guys too, so no duplication of effort. In fact, what we have done wouldn’t be possible in such a short time frame with any other framework.

I’d hate to have missed this message. Thanks Andrew!