A Wicket Diary

Eelco reminded me to take a look at the guestbook example on the Wicket Library to see whether anybody was trying it out. Well, here’s a list of comments posted there:

6/29/05 ok I think this should be a good framework
6/29/05 Det är tröttsamt att lära sig en ny programmeringsmodell. Vad får jag här som fattas i de som jag redan använder?
6/29/05 vERY NICE
6/28/05 good stuff
6/28/05 cool stuff
6/28/05 china duxu was here
6/28/05 Joey was here
6/28/05 I prefer wings
6/28/05 Laszlo is not bad too 
6/28/05 Will I switch from Tapestry???? Who can say 
6/28/05 it's not bad, I appreciate the swing-like model, but it's not as easy as it seems... =D
6/27/05 wicket looks really cool...
6/26/05 Any Easier?
6/25/05 I think I like it
6/24/05 Hi, someone reading this???.. :-OOO

This blog is the answer to the last question: Yes we read (sometimes) the guestbook.

I don’t know what the Danish, Norwegian or Swedish comment means, I hope it is not some plug for a wicked site.

The presentation has been given, I’m finally of the hook. All things considered I think the presentation was great, albeit short. The number of slides was pretty high, but somehow Wicket makes development so easy that there’s not much to explain. We did the whole of the slides and demo in 40 minutes (we started 5 minutes early, according to the alarm clock), thus leaving a lot of room for questions. Fortunately the questions about Wicket were all great (no flamebaits) and with some help of my co-developers all were answered satisfactory.

The turnup, considering we were competing against Spring and AJAX, pretty good, we think somewhere between 200 and 300 people attended. To all that attended, thank you. I hope you enjoyed the presentation and will consider using Wicket as your main web application framework.

Tonight I attended a session on the new Brazilian Public Health Care System which centralizes the administration of patients medical history, scheduling of and authorization of (expensive) treatments, medication, etc. It is an all encompassing system for the previously jaded health care system.

Before the introduction people had to go to their doctors, which would need to gain authorization to prescribe for instance a MRI scan by using lots of paper transported by motor cyclists. When the authorization came through (delivered on lots of paper by motorcycle no doubt) the patient would recieve a note stating ‘You are allowed to get a MRI scan’ and would be responsible to find a hospital having a MRI scanner and not too long a waiting list. All in all, a patient would be pretty lucky to have his guts scanned within a few months (for values of few larger than 3).

In comes the health care system, eliminating all paperwork, educating people to use computers (people who haven’t touched a computer mouse in their lives), and shortening the MRI scanning wait from > 3 months to a mere month. This system saves lives, makes people connect with the current state of technology, improves their job quality, etc.

I have only one thing to say to this: WOW!

The system was developed by 30 developers (the total team size is unknown by me) in 4 months of crunching code. Astonishing! They used Struts, EJB, maven, XDoclet, junit, ant, APT, eclipse, netbeans, etc. They took out the whole open source stack and created a very complex and complete system. Unfortunately for the friendly Brazilians, they started working on the system in january 2004, so Wicket was not there to help them out :-). Congratulations on this piece of great social engineering and I hope to hear more later.