A Wicket Diary

Finally after 3 months of silence, SourceForge is enabling the project statistics again. It is hard to believe in your project when you can’t see how many downloads you have had. I especially think that this lack of statistics hurts new projects as most users (like I) tend to look for activity in the project. The SF.net statistics are a great value for this.

Here’s the quote from the SourceForge site, from the Strategic Projects page:

Statistics:For the past seven months, SourceForge.net staff have been working to re-engineer the statistics infrastructure as to provide real-time statistics updates, better underlying scalability and reduce site performance impact. The initial code implementation work has been completed and code is undergoing internal review prior to launch. Various supporting work (such as documentation) is also occurring in preparation for launch. A message will be sent to project administators during the week of 2005-04-25 to describe the changes occurring to project rankings, and other details of the launch plan. Similar information will also be made available as news on the alexandria project after the mailing occurs. (Last updated: 2005-04-21 Pacific)

I finally presented Wicket to my esteemed collegues at Topicus. The presentation didn’t go too good. First I didn’t get the benefits of Wicket good in the picture, why it is so much better than Tapestry and JSF (read on), and as a bonus, I hit on a minor bug while ad-libbing the addition of a delete object button to my sample application. This I hadn’t exercised, so in complete compliance to Murphy’s Law, an abominable stack trace showed up in my browser. Nice one when one of your collegues is a JSF supporter!

I will have to work on the presentation before I give it to the public as I am not quite happy with the way the presentation flowed.

The Wicket presentation I was writing earlier about is finished. It took a lot of will power to create it and I hope it resembles anything good. Perhaps I will be putting the presentation on the web, but that is not certain at this time.

In the mean time, why don’t you look at the Hello World Example of the Wicket project.

For my employer, Topicus I need to give a presentation concerning Wicket, the new Java web application framework. I’ve been willing to do so for a couple of weeks, and last monday I couldn’t postpone it any more, so I sent the invitations to all Topicus employees. Now I only need to deliver and that is pretty hard… I should stop writing this blog and go work in the presentation.

I have spend all morning creating a custom XSLT stylesheet for the Wicket project so that a RSS feed is generated each and every time the front page is created using maven.

The feed is extracted from the Latest News section and transformed into a RSS-0.91 XML file. The biggest hurdle I had to overcome was the absence of getting the current date into the resulting XML file. Why oh why isn’t a standard date/time facility available in XSL? I had to resort to Xalan-J specific functions in order to get the current date in the feed.

The only problem I now have is that the Sage RSS reader plugin for firefox doesn’t show the update date when the feed is read. I hope that Sage sees when the RSS is updated, otherwise my efforts have been nought.

UPDATE: Sage RSS works like a charm!