Today a new Wicket based project has announced itself: Wicket Web Beans (WWB). WWB is project that allows you to use the JavaBeans specification to quickly, and I really mean quickly create CRUD type user interfaces.
Dan, the creator of Wicket Web Beans writes:
Wicket Web Beans (WWB) is a Wicket component toolkit for displaying and editing POJOs that conform to the JavaBeans specification. Web pages are automatically generated based on bean properties and certain conventions. If necessary, the layout, editability, and actions of these pages can be customized on an exception basis. In other words, the toolkit normally does what you’d expect, but when it doesn’t, you can override its behavior.
From the documentation I could peruse, this sounds like an amazing addition to the Wicket framework space. You can get it now, downloads start at Wicket 1.2.6, and I think support for Wicket 1.3 is in the works.
Hmm..
Sounds pretty similar to something I have been doing at work for the past day or so.. Although the “convention” used in what I have been implementing is annotations for the most part, for instance, if you want a String field to be represented by a TextField in a form, you simply annotate it with @TextField.
Similar things are used for validation, and annotations for DropDownChoices can define the source and type of the choices (for instance, how to retrieve a List).