Last friday I gave a presentation on Wicket at the awesome JavaPolis conference in Antwerp. Unfortunately I was only able to attend friday, which meant driving in early in the morning and delivering the presentation pre-coffee (the adrenaline rush is enough to keep an elephant awake for a week).
I had planned to spend about 20 minutes introducing Wicket and then spend the rest of the presentation working through a live example based on the Cheese store from Wicket in Action‘s chapter 4.
I had prepared the live demo pretty good and knew how to complete it in roughly 25 to 30 minutes. The problem with live coding is that doing it standing up, in front of ~600 people and on a schedule is something different than sitting behind your desk. I had everything set up ready to go, but it is the little things that creep in to get you off guard. For instance having a phantom Java process claiming port 8080 when you want to start your demo, or having a too small a font for the Eclipse editors.
Though enough things went wrong, I remain convinced that doing a live demo is more enticing than watching a series of slides pass by. Nothing keeps a crowd more awake than seeing code actually work.
Tips for next time:
- Set a big font in all the Eclipse editors: 16pt or more. It is not good to have to modify this during your session.
- Make sure all Java processes are killed before the session starts, and then add those that you want. I had a quickstart session running from the evening before when my Eclipse crashed.
- Less history, more benefits of using Wicket, such as object oriented web development
If you want to see how the example should have turned out, I have uploaded the presentation I gave to slideshare. I have added the slides I had as backup just in case the demo would fail. This way you can see how it was meant to be.
Slideshare says: “Download not available”
Yep, I’ve disabled downloading of the presentation. You have to watch it online.
I was there. I liked the demo part. Great to see how you kept your cool with all the errors. In the theory part I missed a comparison with other technologies like JSF, Tapestry, … That would have made the advocacy stronger and maybe convinced me and others of choosing wicket above JSF.
One thing I did expect was that I would make mistakes, that is why I was able to continue. But thanks for your kind words!
The two things I regret are: the number of mistakes and that I couldn’t resolve all of them quickly enough. This made the demo take longer, and ate precious time for some nice stuff…
I had quite some nice tricks up my sleeve to show the power of Wicket:
– Refactor the shopping cart into a Panel and reuse it on both the front page and checkout page.
– Modify the remove link into an AjaxFallbackLink
– Adding validation to the form
– Adding a DropDownChoice component to select states, and
– Create a unit test to test the ShoppingCart panel.
I was there too and it was just great. Don’t worry about ghost processes (my machine is full of them, seems to come with Eclipse), the message was clear: Wicket doesn’t suck. Two years ago it was around 60 people at the presentation, and now 600 – that’s tremenduous progress and a clear indication that something is just right with this framework.
Here’s a blog entry I came across a couple of days back:
http://blog.xebia.com/2007/12/15/javapolis-2007/
“Martijn Dashorts gave an overview of Wicket and daringly built a small web application during his presentation. It convinced me that for html-based applications, Wicket is the best Java framework at this moment. Forget about Struts, Spring MVC, JSF and Tapestry. Wicket even has pretty good Ajax support, so forget about GWT as well …”
Great show!
My google alert came across that one
. It also found this blog entry titled Wicket-vs-GWT:
I saw the presentation too and convinced 2 colleages to join me. I started with Wicket just before the meeting in Amsterdam in november. I already was impressed and convinced them on my current project. But my colleages were impressed too.
The demo was just as good and possibly better than other demos I saw in Antwerpen. So don’t beat yourself for that. I must say that you didn’t need to excuse yourself all the time. Everybody knows and understands that demos can be tricky so nobody will hang you for it. Great job.
The only thing I missed was a link to other projects within the wicket community (like WASP, GMap2, and others like on the Wicket meetup). Just one slide to show the spectrum of the community.
Yeah, I was there too and you made me end up going through some tutorials until 5 on Monday morning!
I was there too. I hope the mail I’ve sent to you didn’t discourage you
Dude, when is Wicket in Action going to be done? Eagerly (as opposed to lazily) looking forward to it. Good luck.
Hi,
I was not there but one thing that all real life developpers know, is that it can break. Some faileing demo has never stopped me – funny, no? On the contrary, a “flash” or a ppt demo is for me the proof that it does not actually work