A Wicket Diary

Oh the joys of being a core contributor to an open source project. Wicket has enjoyed two new releases: a bug fix release on the 1.0 branch and a new release of the Wicket 1.1 branch.

Things are looking good though. A number of AJAX experiments are already under construction, and portlet support is finding its way into Wicket. The first baby steps have been done and we are going to finalize 1.1 soon.

In the meantime, we could use your help on testing Wicket 1.1, so go to the SourceForge downloads section and download our newest beta release!

Cameron Braid has begun on his Wicket journey and started in AJAX country. Both Cameron and Ryan Sonnek are working with the script.aculo.us javascript library.

I can’t wait to see what they think up next…

I’ve just released 1.1-beta 3. It contains the first cut of the IPageable interface change, and it is the first release after the validation changes. Please test this release and see how we can possibly improve on these parts.

We want to finalize the 1.1 branch as soon as possible, but not without sacrificing quality. So please help us test this release and send in your bug reports. The sooner we are able to finalize 1.1, the sooner we can focus on 1.2 and bring you Ajax, Portlets and all other nice things.

The announcement

Wicket 1.1-beta 3 is available for download and testing. This is a beta release, so
you may expect some API changes. Most notable features in this release are:

• Component developers can now initialize resources when the app starts up
• Added WebSession.getId() and WebRequestCycle.getWebSession()
• Added AbstractReadOnlyModel Issue: 1250030. Thanks to Igor Vaynberg.
• Fixed: AbstractDetachableModel doesn’t propogate attach/detach, Thanks to Cameron Braid
• Fixed: Can’t have two FeedbackPanels, Thanks to Simon Berriman
• Fixed: FeedbackPanel produces illegal HTML, Thanks to Gili Tzabari
• Fixed: WicketServlet.doGet URI bug, Thanks to Jan Bares
• Fixed: Classloading problems that caused problems loading markup/resources for components that were loaded by another classloader than the current one
• Extended markup inheritance to support panels and borders
• Made a significant reduction in the size of pages, especially big pages
• Refactored feedback completely. The new code is smaller, more powerful and more elegant, but it will break clients.
• Added automatic multiPart support to Form.

See the complete list of changes here.

The Wicket team is pleased to announce the Wicket 1.0.2 release!

http://wicket.sourceforge.net

Wicket is a Java web application framework that takes simplicity, separation of concerns and ease of development to a whole new level. Wicket pages can be mocked up, previewed and later revised using standard WYSIWYG HTML design tools. Dynamic content processing and form handling is all handled in Java code using a first-class component model backed by POJO data beans that can easily be persisted using your favourite technology.

This release fixes some bugs, and with that introduces one API breaking change.The API change involves the IResourceStreamLocator interface, where the locate method now takes a ClassLoader as an extra parameter. Passing in null will use the context classloader.

So while this is a maintenance release, please make sure your code still compiles with this release.

Changes in this version include:

Fixed bugs:

• newChoiceItem does not use object parameter but selects directly from list Issue: 1263892. Thanks to Arjan Zwaan.
• Backport: AbstractDetachableModel doesn’t propogate attach/detach Issue: 1253113.
• Backport: serialization bug in LocalizedImageResource
• Backport: possible NullPointerException in DynamicImageResource.getResourceStream()
• Backport: catch if session is saved to disk and reloaded again but locale is changed
• fix for classloading problems that caused problems loading markup/ resources for components that were loaded by another classloader than the current one.
• Backport: closed FileOutputStream in wicket.util.file.Files in finally block

Have fun!

-The wicket team

Wicket inspires a lot of people to write nice, clean web applications. Now the code_poet has written a nice poem about Wicket and AJAX. It has good metrum and it shows that even though AJAX support is still crude, Wicket and AJAX rhyme!

Ryan Sonnek has published a Auto Complete TextField component for Wicket using AJAX. Although the component code is a bit complex, the usage of the component has the Wicket feel all over it.

How would you like to use a full fledged AJAX component with no more code than:

And Java:

AutocompleteResultGenerator searcher =
    new AutocompleteResultGenerator() {
        public String[] getResults(String input) {
            return new String[] {”Bob”, “Jamie”, “Eric”};
        }
    };
form.add(new AutoCompleteTextField(”email”, searcher));

That would be awesome, wouldn’t it? With Wicket this is possible.