A Wicket Diary

Since the start of Wicket we only wanted the best of breed components. Now with the advent of high quality, AJAX enabled JavaScript libraries, we can provide the means of building such components. Ryan Sonnek has been actively building the first components based on scriptaculous, and my employer, Topicus has two students building open source Ajax components for the coming 5 months. Some times the good things just fall together.

In the process of creating the best of breed components we feel it is important to have the basic support into the Wicket core, but the library specifics in their own projects on Wicket Stuff. This will help moving those projects faster, basing their release cycles on the release cycles of Dojo and Scriptaculous, instead of the somewhat slower release cycle of Wicket. This basically means that the Dojo and Scriptaculous support will be extracted from the Wicket core, and when you want to use such a library, you have to download a seperate jar. It is my intention and primary goal to make those projects available as soon as possible.

I’m moving the build of the Wicket to Maven 1.1. Maven is still beta, but it seems that most quirks have been solved and it works quite well with the Wicket website.

In order to create the (critically acclaimed) Wicket website, I had to tweak the official site template provided with maven. When all open source projects just use the default template provided by maven, then all projects look the same. Yes, default project structures are a good thing, and also structured documentation, but having all sites look the same is too communistic in my opinion :-).

Note to self: make sure other contributors move also to maven 1.1

I’ve just uploaded the first release candidate for Wicket 1.1. With this release, Wicket 1.1 is now feature complete and we will soon deliver the final release. Notable features in Wicket 1.1 are:

• JavaScript support
• CSS support
• Basic AJAX support
• Markup inheritence
• Date picker component (in wicket-extensions)
• and much more

Please help us test this release so we can make finalize 1.1 before the end of the month!

Here is the announcement:

The wicket team is pleased to announce the Wicket 1.1-rc1 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.

Changes in this version include:

New Features:

• Resource.setHeaders(WebResponse response) so that users can add any header
  they want (cacheable/content disposition) when the resource is served
  Issue: 1286190,1221732.
• Buttons can have a model now, for the buttons value attribute
• added protected method Session.attach() that is called right before a
  session is used for a request
• Added FormComponent.getInputName() that by default generates a name from
  the Form (not included) to the component for better/smaller input names

Fixed bugs:

• AttributeModifer can’t be shared between components Issue: 1286620.
• Infinite loop when adding attributemodifier twice Issue: 1286607.
• StaticFileResource wasn’t used and seemed to be a relic that was refactored
  to PackageResource. StaticFileResource is removed from Wicket. Issue:
  1263833. Thanks to Johan Compagner.
• Attributes should preserve case. Before this fix, attributes were converted
  to lower case. Not anymore now. Issue: 1286616. Thanks to Cameron Braid.
• Internal Error when using back buttons and Links in ListView Issue:
  1284498. Thanks to Kenneth Foo Chuan Khit.
• Odd behaviour when Wicket is the “root” (/*) servlet Issue: 1284029. Thanks
  to Gwyn Evans.
• null values in PageParameters are now ignored totally when generating urls,
  instead of resulting in ‘x=null’. Issue: 1284508. Thanks to Matej Knop.
• fix: now allow multiple ajax handler implementations to contribute to the
  page’s header Thanks to Arto Arffman.
• Redirect url generating issues. The url was generated before
  Component.onInternalBeginRequest() and that method can generate another
  version.
• Clearer message when trying to render abstract Page. Issue: 1255061. Thanks
  to Gili Tzabari.
• <wicket:head> behaviour slighty changed to be more intuitiv.
• addToHeader() is nor longer required. Just use add() to add components
  which are inside a head section
• xmlns:wicket=”http:/…” is now removed from markup as well if
  setStripWicketTag(true) Issue: 1276640. Thanks to Simon Berriman.
• <select …/> is now allowed and will automatically be converted into
  a open-body-close tag Issue: 1243152. Thanks to Eelco Hillenius.
• Fixed wrong implementation off getParameters() in WebRequestWithCryptedUrl
  Issue: 1275726. Thanks to Ingram Chen.
• Unescaped <b> tag in XmlTag Javadoc Issue: 1280468. Thanks to Simon
  Berriman.

Changes:

• Moved resource reference classes from extensions into core Issue: 1255188.
  Thanks to Gili Tzabari.

Removed features:

• Integrated classes from concurrent.jar into wicket.util, removing the need
  for concurrent.jar Issue: 1283301.

Have fun!

-The wicket team

We are moving the Wicket Quickstart project to the core Wicket project. The quickstart project allows you to quickly start experimenting with Wicket.

When I need to test something from say the examples, then I just download and unzip the quickstart distribution and copy/paste the examples code into the project. This allows me to quickly see whether code still works.

Perhaps I should create another movie showing how to do this.

Wicket 1.1-rc1 is coming!

We are currently busy looking at the open issues, and try to solve them. Later this weekend we will release the first release candidate for Wicket 1.1.