A Wicket Diary

In Nathan’s continuing series of articles about Wicket, he just delivered the final installment on JavaWorld. The subject this time is persistency and Wicket. In this article he discusses four ways to connect your Wicket application with a database:

1. Spring
2. Hibernate
3. Databinder
4. ActiveObjects

On Wicket and persistency:

Wicket was designed with the intentionally narrow focus of “enabling component-oriented, programmatic manipulation of markup.” Of course, Wicket must account for requirements outside of that domain, such as data persistence, but it does so indirectly and flexibly, without incorporating any one solution.

Then he continues with his examples in 7 pages of goodness with thorough examples for each of the technologies. He concludes:

All this should be plenty to get you up and running with a data-driven Wicket application in one of the four directions detailed in these examples. You could of course also go in an entirely different direction, whatever suits your coding style and application requirements — there are, as these four examples are intended to show, many different ways to get from here to there.

Enjoy reading this final installment of the Web development with Wicket series. The full series comprises of:

1. The state of Wicket
2. Reducing and reusing code
3. Many ways to persist

Our friend Peter Thomas has done it again: he has written a great piece about the differences between Wicket and GWT. His conclusion:

Overall, a perception of GWT I couldn?t get rid of while working with it is that it feels like a hack ? but of course, a very well engineered hack. Maybe if you really have a lot of stuff you want to do on only the client side, it is fine. From the perspective of someone used to Java server-side programming, there are too many things about the unique approach that leak through - not being able to do ?view-source? and the added complexity of RPC being some of them.