A Wicket Diary

When your project is called Wicket, you will have to live with some consequences when your users Google for your project:

• somehow they will find themselves on a green field having a red ball being hurled at them (cricket)
• we didn’t imagine a flurry bear yielding a light saber at startroopers to be associated with our project
• searching for Wicket will result in queries like:
  • wicket framework
  • wicket java
  • wicket -cricket
  • wicket -cricket -ewok
  • wicket -cricket -ewok -croquet -starwars -church -hotel -poverty -candles -brood -screwing -adoption -card -icon -earning -wackers

Geertjan Wielenga has blogged about running the Wicket Kick Start Project in NetBeans. Check the Kick Start project out if you wish to jump start your Wicket development, and use the description of Geertjan to do so in NetBeans. Other IDE’s currently supported are: Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA (for IDEA: temporary download here).

It is not by intention that we don’t currently support NetBeans, we just aren’t NetBeans users. It is a matter of preference, taste and like it/hate it (this also goes for Eclipse, which also has many followers and haters). Perhaps someone will switch to NetBeans when the 4.1 release comes out?

In my previous post, I mentioned that I was going to run maven 2, continuum, fedora core 3, IBM JDK 1.4, etc. on an obsolete laptop (Toshiba satelite pro 4200). I use this 4 year old laptop mainly because of the following reasons:

• I have trouble letting hardware go unused
• Wicket needs a continuous integration machine
• I want to test maven 2, but don’t want to do this on my own boxes, it might break stuff
• I heard from co-workers that the IBM JDK is faster on Linux than the Sun JDK
• I like a challenge
• more things I can’t think of right now

After downloading the maven 2 distribution, I unzipped the archive in my home directory and chmod +x */bin/m2 made sure that the m2 script is executable. I also made sure $JAVA_HOME is set to my IBM JDK installation (for some reason in /opt :-S).

According to the maven 2 website, I can issue m2 –version in order to verify the installation:

[dashorst@localhost maven2-test]$ ~/maven-2.0-alpha-1/bin/m2 –version
Maven version: 2.0-alpha-1

So far so good… Next in the getting started guide is creating your own project:

m2 archetype:create -DgroupId=com.mycompany.app -DartifactId=my-app

Alas, this doesn’t work, as apparently, a transitive dependency cannot be resolved, as it isn’t in the ibiblio repository… It appears to be the velocity 1.4 pom (to be found in your local repository, most probably in a subdir called .m2/repository in your home directory). Removing this dependency from the velocity 1.4 pom made sure the project generation works. Now I have my first Maven 2 project!

First findings:

• I don’t find it particularly fast, but that can be attributed to several factors: slow laptop (very likely, slow operating system (not likely), slow JDK (possibility)
• I don’t like the fact I need to download some (unknown!) jdbc jar, or edit the velocity pom in order to pass the ‘getting started’
• The current structure is still a blur to me, I don’t know how to run the unittests

As my experience with maven 2 will grown, this blog will be filled with more findings on this subject! Keep posted…

The Maven project has released the first public alpha of their continuous integration build tool Continuum. As I’m currently setting a laptop up as a CI machine for the Wicket project, I’m going to take Continuum for a spin. As an added bonus I’ll also try Maven 2.

And it gets even better: I also installed Fedora Core 2 (had some old installation disks laying around) AND upgraded the laptop to Fedora Core 3. As a final note: I’ve also installed the IBM Java Development Kit 1.4 for Linux.

Could this get me into trouble?

And Yet Another Wicket Demo is available online:

The CD Application

This demo can be found at the Wicket Library