A Wicket Diary

The first major Wicket Dojo components have been released in Wicket Contrib Dojo 0.3! The two students working at my employer, Topicus as interns have released their first components combining Wicket and Dojo Toolkit.

They have included several tutorials, giving you a heads start when using these components. They write:

Hi all,

We’re proud to anounce our first real contrib-dojo release
This release contains:

• Dojo FX Decorators
• Dojo FX Tooltip
• FX ajax Validation
• FXFeedbackIndicator
• xdocs updated with new site
• Example applications

You can check our release at
http://wicket-stuff.sourceforge.net/wicket-contrib-dojo/

Have fun with the release, and if you have any comments, please feel
free to post them on the mailinglist

Regards,

Ruud and Marco

This marks their first Ajax/Dojo/Wicket release, so congrats guys!

At my employer (Topicus) we have two interns that are building Dojo Ajax components for the Wicket framework.

They are progressing steadily, and (after todays progress meeting) are going to build a formal release of their efforts, based on Wicket 1.1. The release and its notes should become available on the Wicket Dojo project.

As an example, let me show you what they can do with one line of code. In our current (commercial project) we introduced serverside validation for social security numbers. For this we used one of the components of Ruud and Marco. When the validation of the input fails, the input field should fade to red. When it is corrected, it should fade back to the original color. With one line of code, we were able to add this functionality, and have the Ajax call implemented:

ssnField = new RequiredTextField("ssn");
ssnField.add(SsnValidator.getInstance());
ssnField.add(new FXValidationAjaxHandler("onBlur",
        FXValidationAjaxHandler.REQUIREDCOLOR));

That is all there’s to it!

Keep an eye on their progress as they are building very nice components!

Brent Roberts likes working with Wicket, and I’ve never even seen a message from him on our mailinglists. There are probably a lot of users that aren’t vocal, but using Wicket silently.

I like hearing succes stories, so share them!

For all of you who would like to learn more about Wicket components, we have an excellent live component reference, showing you what each component does, and how you can use it.

If you want to have this at home, then it is very simple: download the Wicket Examples project and deploy the war file from the distribution in your favorite application server. The component reference can be found at the root page of the web application.

The Wicket team is proud to announce the availability of Wicket 1.1 for download! Wicket is a Java component oriented web application framework that takes simplicity, separation of concerns and ease of use to a whole new level. Wicket web applications consist of HTML markup and Java classes. No strange languages, no strange markup, no configuration files, no specialized, expensive tools: just Java, HTML and you.

This Wicket version contains a lot of improvements from the 1.0 version. New features include:

• Simplified feedback and validation - enables custom feedback strategies
• Live Component Reference - the examples project contains a component reference showing how to use the components.
• JavaScript and CSS support for components - contribute JavaScript and CSS from your component to the using page
• Markup Inheritance - enables template pages and components
• Inclusion of external markup
• Simplified Choice component
• Advanced Table components - easily generate pageable/sortable tables backed by database or any other datasource in wicket-extensions (graduated components from wicket-contrib-dataview)
• Less dependencies - we removed several library dependencies
• Customizable Form handling - easy for quick forms, easily enables full custom form processing
• Improved resource handling
• Date picker component - will not get you dates, but a JavaScript and text field enabled localized calendar component.
• Improved URL handling
• AJAX request handling support - support for two leading AJAX JavaScript libraries is available as separate downloads from our Wicket Stuff project: scriptaculous and DOJO toolkit

The Wicket team wishes to extend their gratitude to the user and developer community for their testing efforts and help, making this release a reality!

The Wicket 1.1 distribution can be downloaded from the SourceForge servers by following this link.

The Wicket 1.1 release documentation can be found at: http://wicket.sourceforge.net/wicket-1.1