A Wicket Diary

Whilst building our final release, I wanted to upgrade the maven assembly plugin because currently it always appends -bin to the distribution. As our packages always include both source and binary in the same zip file, the -bin is not correct. The 2.1 version of this plugin fixes this with a setting.

The biggest challenge is finding out how to update your maven plugins, without having to specify the version in your pom. As you may notice, I have scourged the maven documentation site and wasn’t able to find it within 5 minutes. So to save you the trouble of having to go through this yourself, here’s how you update your plugins to use the newest released versions:

mvn -U somegoal

Where you substitute the ’somegoal’ string with a goal of your liking. The documentation doesn’t state wether the goal you supply has any relationship to the plugins that get updated. I have my new version of the assembly plugin, so I’m a happy camper again. On with releasing 1.2 final!

UPDATE OK, I’ve celebrated too early. The update also ‘fixed’ bugs in other plugins, and now my carefully constructed velocity template for our website doesn’t work anymore. AARGH.

And WORST OF ALL somehow now my Wicket homepage is called ‘Maven - Home’. WTF?

Apparently, the ‘name’ attribute of the ‘project’ tag in the site-descriptor is now actually used, where it previously wasn’t.

After quite some hard labor, making days of about 16 hours screen time, I have submitted my presentation for the European Serverside Java Symposium. I hope to see you there!

Note to self: writing a book, working fulltime on several key projects, working on open source projects, working on publicity is not good for social life.

Is it me, or has SourceForge.net updated its activity statistics? Wicket is now in the top 25 most active projects on sourceforge, but we haven’t done anything on our part to improve our stats. Not that I’m complaining or anything…

I have released our (hopefully) final release candidate for Wicket web framework. You’ll be able to download it when sourceforge has distributed the packages to the mirrors. Apparently they fixed the CVS service but now the main download site is down. Perhaps it is just a fluke and it will be up and running soon. In the mean time, you can upgrade your packages using our Maven 2 repository.

In related news, I am unable to connect to the http://repo1.maven.org primary repository server of Maven. This is a nuisance as I was busy upgrading my mavenized projects to use rc4, and am unable to download the sources.

Here’s the ‘official’ press release (it will take some time before I upload it to our main website):

Wicket 1.2-rc4 available

The
Wicket
project has released the fourth release candidate of the
1.2 effort. We expect this to be the final candidate and
if no serious bugs are found we will release 1.2 final
later this week.

This is our fourth release candidate of the Wicket 1.2
version. Major features of Wicket 1.2 include:

• Native, cross-platform AJAX support: use AJAX
  without having to write a single line of
  JavaScript. Wicket’s AJAX cross-platform
  capabilities
  

  have been rated ‘A’
  

• Render multiple components in one AJAX call,
  where each component can occupy any part of the
  page
• Improved markup inheritance: panels, pages,
  header contributions

• Improved and simplified internationalization
  (i18n) support, using ,
  better resource bundle lookup strategy

• Multiple form component validation, validate two
  or more fields that are related
• Improved form handling: clear form validation
  workflow that allows you to much easier defined
  required and type conversion attributes of a
  form component
• Nice URL support through URL mounting
• Markup fragments (inline panels)
• Improved performance by replacing OGNL with our
  own object graph language parser
• Response filter support, added ServerTime and
  ServerClientTime filters
• Reloading of resource bundles in development
  mode
• Improved unit test support for your Wicket
  components and pages through the WicketTester,
  create unittests that run outside the container.
• Out-of-the-box AJAX components: paging
  navigator, link with fallback, auto-updater,
  AJAX form, AJAX submit buttons, etc.
• Improved authorization and authentication
  support, giving you the power to specify
  authorization at the component level. An example
  project featuring a role based, annotation
  framework is now part of the standard
  distribution.

• Spring support for injecting your business logic
  into your web pages in a non-intrusive manner,
  while still being able to use the convenient
  Wicket idiom for creating pages (using the Java
  new
  operator).

• Improved settings system: settings are now
  partitioned into logical groupings to make them
  easier to find
• Numerous bug fixes and minor improvements

The upcoming final Wicket 1.2 release will be a
major landmark in the history of Wicket and is
highly anticipated.

We have tried to keep API changes to a minimum, but
had to change and remove some methods and classes.
Wicket 1.2 will not be a drop-in replacement, though
most of your application’s pages and components
should not be affected. There is a migration guide
available on our wiki:

Migrating to Wicket 1.2

This is the fourth release candidate. All our unit tests
work and we have fixed numerous bugs in the last weeks. We
expect this release to become the final release candidate,
and hope no big issues will surface. Please help us iron
out the last bugs by downloading and testing this release
candidate!

Skills Matter has a Wicket Training Course available. The course takes 3 whopping days and after that you’ll have earned yourself a black belt in Wicket application building. The course covers such hot topics as:

• Basic Wicket concepts
• Building data centric applications
• Building Ajax applications
• Using Spring
• Authentication and authorization
• more…

See the Wicket Training Course page on their website for more details.