A Wicket Diary

The Wicket users list on sourceforge will be shutting down! You need to subscribe to our user list at our new Apache home. Send a message to users-subscribe@wicket.apache.org and follow the instructions.

The user list at sourceforge does not accept any new subscriptions, and we will be shutting down all traffic shortly.

Subscribers to our new Apache Wicket Users list will receive a free copy of Chapter 1 from the forthcoming best seller: Wicket in Action by Eelco Hillenius and (yours truly) Martijn Dashorst. So don’t hesitate! Send a message to users-subscribe@wicket.apache.org and get your free copy of chapter 1 now!

Sources have indicated that the first two chapters of Wicket in Action will be made available this week, with Chapter 1 launching today! Chapter 1 is a free download, so there is really nothing holding you back to see what this book is all about!

The table of contents (may be subject to change, so don’t shoot us if something is different in the final book) is as follows:

1. What is Wicket? (MEAP, FREE)
2. The architecture of Wicket
3. Setting up a Wicket project (MEAP)
4. Building a cheesy Wicket application
5. Understanding models
6. Using basic components
7. Using forms for data entry
8. Composing your pages
9. Creating custom components
10. Creating rich components
11. Authorization and authentication
12. Working with resources
13. Localization and internationalization
14. Database driven applications
15. Putting your Wicket application in production
16. Component index

So get your wallets ready, live the rest of the month on bread and water and order Wicket in Action now!

With Wicket’s recent graduation we had become homeless: the Incubator didn’t
want us anymore (you’re graduated, get out!), and our TLP was not yet
established. In the mean time, the universe seemed to conspire against us:
lethal solar flares tried to divert infrastructure’s attention to burning
machines. But we prevailed!

Behold… our new home:

Many thanks go out to the infrastructure team at Apache.

There are still a couple of remaining items, but they will be dealt with accordingly and soon, as long as there are no new tricks from the Universe to hold us back!

Remember that some of us were joking about Big Old Blue three letter acronym
with a market cap of about 1 gazillion dollars (which according to the latest
exchange rates amounts to about 1 euro) was going to monopolize Wicket? Well,
to many jokes there seems to be a small truth at its core.

It appears that Wicket has been on big blue’s radar for some time. Moving to
Apache certainly hasn’t been bad for our reputation, and having graduated
makes it easy for product managers to choose a web framework solution that is
no longer an obscure project hosted sourceforge, but a vibrant project,
cleared of licensing issues and having a solid foundation at its core.

If you don’t believe me (which I can imagine after the prank I pulled somewhere late march), read up on IBM’s interest in Apache Wicket here (registration required).

The list season is on! In a response to Xavier’s top 10 reasons to choose Wicket, James goes beyond that and provides us with a list of reasons to love Wicket. He has worked with Wicket for just about 12 hours, and already has 13 reasons to love Wicket. Here’s reason number 4:

“real re-use. Using every other framework, reuse at the UI layer has been nearly impossible, or at least broken. In struts you could re-use forms, but ended up copying jsp crap around. In wicket, you can make subclasses of existing components (like a panel) that contain your bus specific version of it.”