A Wicket Diary

If you have thought that the Maven project was overly complicated, then consider their struggles in naming plugins and discussing their lifecycle. I found these messages in my inbox whilst browsing the Maven mailinglist archives.

Yes! The Oscars are on its way, and Java developers can do their own voting for things important in your day to day job instead of some fantasy woman (such as Penélope Cruz). You can express your support for your favorite Java open source project at the following locations (and I know yours is Ruby on Rails Wicket)

• The Java Developers Journal 2007 Readers’ Choice Awards (note the 2004 in the URL) and win a FREE years extension of your subscription. (looks like this is only for subscribers)
• The java.com Annual Duke’s Choice Awards
• The sourceforge.net Community Choice Awards (site still is for 2006)

Do I miss the JavaLobby and java.about.com yearly polls? Of course, TheServerSide.com has about a two-weekly polls where JSF gets trashed as being to complicated, Tapestry for being built up from start with every major release, Wicket for being to server memory hungry, Struts for being too old skool (or dead), RIFE for having ugly templates and so on. Perhaps they should create an award for the most uninteresting, uncriticized open source enterprise project.

What about the new comer: infoq, do they start a annual award soon? Or Hani Suleiman with an annual crap award (sort of the Razzies for Java software)?

I want to see some awards!

We are still working hard to get a beta release of (Apache) Wicket 1.3 out the door in the next weeks. We have to receive some license grants of a couple (2 iirc) persons before we can ship the release.

In the mean time we have our own server (kindly provided by Servoy) provide us with a confluence and JIRA setup for Wicket Stuff, and best of all: Bamboo for building and pushing new development builds to the box. The installation of Bamboo on the server and hooking it up provided a push for fixing our builds. Johan, Igor and Frank have worked hard to get the build to complete.

This means that we finally have running 1.3 examples. If you want to see the latest and greatest in action, you can look here:

• Bamboo builds for the build status
• Live Wicket 1.3 examples
• Wicket 2.0 examples (still needs work to be deployed successfully)

As you can see, Wicket 1.3 is maturing and getting stable. We will be able to ship it soon and let you enjoy the new features, and visit our new, temporary, home at Apache.

As a member of the Wicket team, I would like to express our gratitude towards Atlassian for providing their software gratis to the Wicket community.

Filippo Diotalevi (known from the Milan JUG) has released the first version of the Wicket JEE integration project. This project integrates Jave EE 5 with Wicket in a similar fashion the Wicket Spring integration works. By specifying three annotations:

• @EJB - to inject EJB service objects into your pages
• @PersistenceUnit - to inject EntityManagerFactory into your pages
• @Resource - for injecting resource references

you can access your JEE resources and beans from in your pages. This release is built on top of Wicket 1.2.4, so you can start using it now in your production web applications. For more documentation, read further on the Wicket Stuff Wiki.

Download wicket-contrib-jee-1.0 from Wicket Stuff’s download area at SourceForge.

With a flick of a switch I moved my blog from jroller to my own hosted wordpress powered blog. The movers did a great job at packing all my stuff here into nice boxes, and moving it to my new place, including the comments. Even though the moving service was very professional some china may have been broken.

Now why bother moving, and shelling out money for a service that is available for free? Several things triggered me to do the switch:

• speed: jroller has its bad days when it comes to speed. It hosts several hundreds of blogs and needs to serve them all.
• editor compatibility: several blog editors exist, but most of them don’t support the roller api. I’m typing this message using Flock, the social browser. Probably it is possible to direct Flock to be able to post to jroller, but I didn’t want to work with a half baked solution.
• own domain: I like being master of my own little universe, probably a left over from watching He-Man too much during childhood).
• wordpress: I think it is the best blogging tool around at this moment. Some of the templates are beautiful (vertigo squared, jillij) and more are available. On top of that the spam prevention for comments (akistmet) is great.
• statistics: being master of my own domain I get statistics for free with my subscription. Who, where from, when, etc.
• greener grass: when I read the blog of Nathan, I immediately thought: that is what I want: more control, more freedom

So here we are: on martijndashorst.com. I’m still contemplating splitting the Wicket part from my own private life ramblings. However, if I promise to keep the main writing about Wicket with a peek now and then into my personal stuff would you mind?

Soon to be launched: A Wicket Diary at http://wicketdiary.org