OK, here’s the problem with today’s internet and google search results: it is one giant heap of commercial poop. Since I don’t have too many friends in the US and don’t live there, I have to use google for research on popular American culture. At least for those things we don’t see on TV, youtube and in movies.

Today I was looking for pet names for an electronic device: the GPS car navigation system. In Holland we typically call it ‘Truus’. Now if you query google with “pet name gps” you get advertisements for gravestones for your late pets, or personalized gps tracking devices for your pet. I only found one link telling that they petnamed their GPS system ‘Betty’. That sounds right, but only one reference is not really pop culture!

So how do you call your GPS navigation system?

Both Eelco and I are working our asses off to get Wicket in Action done.

Last friday I received feedback on chapter 5. I incorporated the proposed changes and made several adjustments to make the chapter less micromanaged (there was some explaining regarding static versus dynamic models that was really low level). I also moved some small sections around to improve the flow. Nothing too serious, but a setback of a couple of hours for sure.

I also delivered the first draft of chapter 6: the basic building blocks. According to my co-author the chapter “will be a gold mine for n00bs”. I certainly hope there is something for everybody in this chapter, but I agree that it is catered to the less experienced Wicket programmer and making them productive.

The chapter discusses displaying text using labels, links, mounting, URL coding strategies, repeaters (list view and repeating view) and the various actions you can do with components (hiding, removing markup etc).

Eelco just delivered a new revision of chapter 1, and drafts of chapters 12 chapter 10. There will be some shoveling around of the chapter numbers of our third part so currently I am not 100% sure which chapters Eelco actually delivered

It is no secret that Wicket sports one of the most active open source communities in the Java space. If you only look at the mailing list activity hosted on Nabble, you can see that Wicket’s lists put it on the number one spot for web development frameworks, and number three spot of Java related projects. Only a whole aggregated community (Java.net) and Netbeans are in front of it.

But that is not what this post is about. Our London chapter has held a couple of community sessions in the past few months (I’ve announced several of them a couple of times here). This has made more folks enthusiastic about bringing this to more places, including the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark. To keep track of these community meetups we now have a registration page on the Wicket wiki where you can show interest, or add your own local Wicket initiative.

Please check our community meetings page out and add yourself to one of the meetups or organize one of your own!