A Wicket Diary

We had a great time at JavaPolis in Antwerp. We renewed a lot of contacts we had made on JavaOne, and got some new friends. And as a plus to all the belgian beer, we even learned some new things!

The things that stood out most were IMO:

• Aspect oriented programming: it is really becoming mainstream with the adoption of AOP by Spring and the integration they will provide in Spring 2
• Distributed caching: I really enjoyed talking to Cameron Purdy on the proposition his company provides for distributed caching. As our company is in the business of building ASP (not the M$ term) web applications, their product seems quite interesting
• King Kong: the classic has been treated with respect and will enable new generations to enjoy this love story. Peter Jackson did it again.

A great thanks to Stephan Jansen for making this happen!

The belgian JavaPolis has 2100 registrants! Even though this is not as huge as the JavaOne conference with its 14000 registrants, this is VERY impressive. I’ll arrive tomorrow evening and hope to do some work on the presentation Eelco and I are going to give.

We hope to see you there! And I’ll try to update this blog with any news items I can gather during the conference…

For those that like to read Java content in their native tongue, the JavaNews magazine has been translated into dutch and french. If you wish, you can also download the english version. To quote from the dutch frontpage:

“Martijn Dashorst bekijkt het leven door een roze bril dankzij Wicket”

Which translates roughly into english as:

“Martijn Dashorst looks at life through pink glasses thanks to Wicket”

This is a (bad) english translation from a dutch proverb. Strange language, that dutch… I guess the translator got enthousiastic about my 3D-glasses I wear on the picture.

The picture with the 3D glasses comes from a vacation Diana (my girlfriend) and I spent in Florida. We were at the Kennedy Space Center, and were just about to see a 3D spaceshuttle movie. Here’s the whole picture:

Wicket is featured on the front page of the JavaNews JavaPolis newsletter (pdf, 4MB). Of course, there is a more in-depth article in the magazine.

The magazine is published for the European Java conference of the year: JavaPolis. And of course, the Wicket team is proud to be on the speaker list.

Here’s a quote from the article:

Having
no special markup means that designers
can mock up your web pages, to be
used directly in development. In a current
project, we work like this. Our
designer creates the pages with mock
data. These pages are validated with
our user panel, and then passed to the
developers. The developers identify
the components on the page, and
implement the backing Java code.

I hope to see you all during JavaPolis!