A Wicket Diary

I have moved my blog from jroller.com to a shared provided server (didn’t want to open up my home network just yet). I didn’t want another huge blogging service such as wordpress.com, rather I wanted a bit more control over what I could do with the service. I installed Wordpress as my blogging application. Having my own (part of a) server is pretty sweet, too bad it isn’t Java hosted.

My hosting provider is bhosted, a PHP/mysql provider in the Netherlands, and I find the service pretty decent until now. Yes, the domain registration could be smoother, but I doubt it is any worse than other providers.

I wanted to preserve my old blog entries and migrate them to my new home. Unfortunately the wordpress installation doesn’t have a connection to jroller to download all posts and import them. So I searched the internets and found more people facing this problem.

Finally I settled on exporting my entries using the wordpress xml format, and thus preserving the comments made by other people on my blog. I then only had to go through 250+ posts to recategorize them (jroller didn’t put blog entries with category ‘java/wicket’ on the front page).

I really have to thank Zeusville for his efforts in creating the Wordpress export template for jroller.

Santa has been generous this year, apparently Wicket has been a good girl the last 12 months.

First Timothy O’Brien wrote an opinion piece where he confessed that:

These days, I?m using? [...] and Wicket for the serious AJAXy web interfaces.

I left out the obligatory RoR/Spring part (you can read about them in the whole article yourself). But (for me) the most interesting part of Tim’s article is in the last part of his blog:

Both Rails and Wicket lend themselves to AJAX, and I?ve found that it is easier to create mega-AJAX complexity in Wicket than it is in Rails - even with RJS.

Even though I haven’t used RoR in anger myself, I think that the template approach that both RoR and JSP follow don’t allow the complexities Wicket enables with the same ease. I’ll have to write an article on this subject matter to back up my claims though (and will do just that when my new wordpress enabled domain is up and running).

And the second reason I think Wicket is has been a good girl is the fact that Santa left a present under the tree. Go, download and unpack your own Wicket wrapped present (packaged in a ZIP or tarball for your convenience).

Best wishes for 2007!

InfoQ has picked up a discussion we had on the Wicket User list where Ryan Crumley explains why he recommends Wicket over established technologies as JSF and Spring MVC.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2006/12/wicket-vs-springmvc-and-jsf

Giving courses concerning Wicket is booming business. Mr. Smith (a.k.a. Nick Heudecker) just returned from a course in Copenhagen, and Matej Knopp also dived into the nightlife of Copenhagen to give a course at a different company. And just today I concluded a one day course for a company where I crammed all Wicket knowledge into one 6 hour presentation together with some live demo-ing.

In preparing my course, I had to return to the basics, as the audience had no prior experience in developing web applications, or Java applications altogether. Even though their exposure to the Java language was limited to the Java course they received in the last weeks, I think I got most of Wicket’s concepts through. They now have three days to work with Spring (new for them), Hibernate (new for them) and Wicket (also new) and get acquainted with the tools of the trade.

Just as Nick told, the concept of the infamous Wicket Model is the toughest part to explain. In preparing for this course I have found more and better ways of explaining them, and will incorporate that into the Models chapter in our book. I also found that the concepts of IDataProvider (and ISortStateLocator, IFilterStateLocator) are also pretty hard: they cover a lot of ground and concepts, therefore making them difficult to grasp at first.

All in all, these are good times for Wicket:

• these last two weeks have introduced yet 24 more people to the dark arts of Wicket.
• almost 100,000 downloads for the Wicket project at SourceForge
• approximate 500 subscribers to the user list
• Wicket 1.3 is already put to the test in a production system (75-100 concurrent users) and it still hasn’t even had a release!
• Job listings for Wicket are rising
• And finally: we’re getting a new design for our Apache based website

Maven 1 users might have discovered this already: the Maven 1 repository at ibiblio.org doesn’t work with Maven 1 anymore. Some network setting at the ibiblio server was changed, which causes a redirect that the httpclient library used by Maven 1 doesn’t know how to follow, and fails.

Fortunately the fix is easy: put the following setting in your build.properties in your home directory (C:\Documents and Settings\[username]):

maven.repo.remote=http://repo1.maven.org/maven

and you’re back in business.