A Wicket Diary

I’ve been awfully quiet with writing about Eelco’s and mine endeavor to deliver our first (and probably last) book: Wicket in Action. As Eelco mentioned last week, we are getting the manuscript ready for MEAPing. This also means picking a cover for our book, and I think we made the right choice. If you ever get touch of us, and are curious why we picked that specific cover, just buy yourself and us a beer (Eelco likes whiskey), and don’t hesitate to ask I can tell you that our cover is smokin’!

As for the writing, it currently has gained speed again. The chapters are being revised to cover the reversal of the constructor change (and you thought you were the only one being bitten by that!), and keeping up with renaming efforts of other team members. We expect to have chapters 1 through 4 available in a couple of weeks, which is dependent on us giving the chapters a final last make over and handing them over to the production team.

When that happens, we will ping you here, there, everywhere!

The veil has been lifted. Thoof is now officially in private beta (and I got to play around with it a bit). Given that the famous (from Revver and other successful website) entrepreneur Ian Clarke is behind this effort and that Jonathan Locke is one of the architects behind the site, the foundation is solid.

VentureBeat writes:

Like Digg, Thoof provides a synopsis of articles on its home page —this includes headline, brief summary, and tags to designate topic matter. It then provides a link to the article, and sends the reader to the original source.

That’s where the similarities with Digg end. It doesn’t let otherreaders rank the articles for you. Rather, it offers articles to youbased on what knows about you, such as IP address (which providesgeographical location), the browser you use, your operating system andthe site you were on when you clicked through to Thoof — all of whichoffer subtle clues about you. Then, additionally, as you searcharticles, it tracks the tags of the articles you read. Finally, it maysoon begin asking you a random question from time to time, to gathermore information.

Thoof was also covered by Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch and he seems sceptical, as most of the previous attempts (SearchFox, Findory and more) did not succeed or even ended up in the deadpool. Many of the comments seem to share the sentiment. However, Ian Clarke explained more of the new selection algorithm behind the site, and if it works, I predict a bright future. In the private beta run I already saw a couple of links I liked (and I hadn’t even clicked!).

Now this may look to the regular reader that I’m promoting a web site because a friend is working on it, but there’s more to it: it is Wicket based (which is one of the reasons Jonathan was asked to come aboard I presume). If it is a successful endeavor (and I trust Ian Clarke to be correct here), then it may become the biggest website running Wicket.

I like the unobtrusive Ajax functionality they built in: when you click the header of a story, the browser sends a notification to the server using Ajax, and then replaces the story panel with a ‘this story has been read’ variant). In the mean time the news article has been loaded in a new window.

If you have some Wicket experience, you can see how they construct their pages based on the markup: ListView or Repeaters, and Panels and Behaviors have been put to good use. I expect there will be some tweaking going on (removing superfluous span tags, or too enthousiastic use of Ajax component replacement) but on the whole it really looks great.

All in all, a very exiting time for Thoof and its creators, and I hope they succeed.

Our London delegate, Al Maw, is organizing a Wicket meetup in London. If you want to celebrate the imminent graduation of Wicket to an Apache top level project, this is your chance to meet, greet Al and other Wicket community members.

The meeting is scheduled for July 3rd, and pending enough interest. Please announce that you are interested in the meet up in this thread.

Get out of the closet, detach that mouse from your fingers and join the Wicket User Group!

Our newly appointed Wicket (P)PMC member Jean-Baptiste Quenot has quietly started a new project called PickWick:

Pickwick is a Wicket-based photo gallery.

• Provides a set of basic pages to render the pictures, organized in folders (called sequences)
• Uses a nice URL displaying the folder name relative to the images directory
• Back-office application to edit the photo gallery
• Thumbnails and scaled images are generated on disk to avoid the complexity of caching systems
• ImageMagick support, for maximum efficiency and to reduce the memory footprint of the JVM
• Java2D support

Now this begs the question: is it a hobby or something used within Joost?

Xavier Hanin (of Ivy fame) has created a tabbed client side JQuery/Wicket panel for use in his open source continuous integration project xooctory. I still haven’t seen the tabs in action, so I can’t comment on their greatness yet.

What struck me most is the ease with which Xavier was able to construct the tabs, which is a feat in its own for both JQuery and Wicket.

Wicket makes very easy to develop such components, and that’s one of the thing I like the most about wicket. [...] My wicket implementation is about 140 lines of Java (well, 50 lines of Java and the rest of comments and imports) and 40 lines of html (most of which is used for testing only). That’s all, and you don’t need to be an expert in wicket to write such a component.

Of course I also looked around on xoocode for more of Xavier’s projects and he seems to like Wicket a lot, so we now have 3 issue trackers (that I know of) written using Wicket (are issue trackers the new blog-in-5-minutes applications?):

• jtrac (Peter Thomas’ trac Nasa inspired tracker)
• bugeater (Philip Chapman/Andrew Lombardi/Ryan Gravener’s issue tracker)
• xoosent (Xavier’s issue tracker)

And other developer tools built using Wicket are xooctory (a continuous integration server), artifactory (a maven proxy). Wicket inspired is the already famous build tool called Gosling, which has performed a reboot, but seems to get into shape pretty fast.