A Wicket Diary

Ohlo just surfaced on my radar. Ohlo is a open source catalogue, similar to the O’Reilly codezoo effort. We have Swik, Freshmeat, etc. How many of these efforts can the internet bear?

Ohlo does looks like a good effort. They parse the code repositories and base some of their statistics on that. A lot of sourceforge projects will fail the test as many will be flagged as one man, inactive projects.

Strange thing is that for the maven project (which is pretty heavy under development) they say that the activity is in decline. Probably the pointer to their repository was not correct.

Is such a catalogue any good? I think it is. I usually try to stay away from one man shows, and projects that haven’t seen much development (unless the software tracker shows no bugs and the project is feature complete). This catalogue shows in a blink of an eye the status of a project and adds nice qualities to it.

Their summary for Wicket:

+ Large, active development team
+ Well-commented source code
! Apache Software License may conflict with GPL

They flag the Apache Software License as conflicting with GPL. Apparently this is caused by one file in our repository trunk which is GPL licensed. The one problem I have is that they are able to discover one file with GPL code, but don’t provide a link to which file that is. Anyway, I doubt this will still be a problem in the next weeks. We are removing all (L)GPL code from our code base as our effort to incubate at Apache continues. The comments in our code seem to please the Ohlo gods:

Wicket is written mostly in Java. Across all Java projects on Ohloh, 35% of all source code lines are comments. For Wicket, this figure is 51%. This high number of comments puts Wicket among the highest one-third of all Java projects on Ohloh.

They conclude this factoid with the comment that the Wicket team is a [...] helpful and disciplined development team.

Read more on Wicket at Ohlo. Oh, and you can stack Wicket, which is something like telling that it is part of your software stack.

If you have thought that the Maven project was overly complicated, then consider their struggles in naming plugins and discussing their lifecycle. I found these messages in my inbox whilst browsing the Maven mailinglist archives.

Yes! The Oscars are on its way, and Java developers can do their own voting for things important in your day to day job instead of some fantasy woman (such as Penélope Cruz). You can express your support for your favorite Java open source project at the following locations (and I know yours is Ruby on Rails Wicket)

• The Java Developers Journal 2007 Readers’ Choice Awards (note the 2004 in the URL) and win a FREE years extension of your subscription. (looks like this is only for subscribers)
• The java.com Annual Duke’s Choice Awards
• The sourceforge.net Community Choice Awards (site still is for 2006)

Do I miss the JavaLobby and java.about.com yearly polls? Of course, TheServerSide.com has about a two-weekly polls where JSF gets trashed as being to complicated, Tapestry for being built up from start with every major release, Wicket for being to server memory hungry, Struts for being too old skool (or dead), RIFE for having ugly templates and so on. Perhaps they should create an award for the most uninteresting, uncriticized open source enterprise project.

What about the new comer: infoq, do they start a annual award soon? Or Hani Suleiman with an annual crap award (sort of the Razzies for Java software)?

I want to see some awards!

Filippo Diotalevi (known from the Milan JUG) has released the first version of the Wicket JEE integration project. This project integrates Jave EE 5 with Wicket in a similar fashion the Wicket Spring integration works. By specifying three annotations:

• @EJB - to inject EJB service objects into your pages
• @PersistenceUnit - to inject EntityManagerFactory into your pages
• @Resource - for injecting resource references

you can access your JEE resources and beans from in your pages. This release is built on top of Wicket 1.2.4, so you can start using it now in your production web applications. For more documentation, read further on the Wicket Stuff Wiki.

Download wicket-contrib-jee-1.0 from Wicket Stuff’s download area at SourceForge.

I have moved my blog from jroller.com to a shared provided server (didn’t want to open up my home network just yet). I didn’t want another huge blogging service such as wordpress.com, rather I wanted a bit more control over what I could do with the service. I installed Wordpress as my blogging application. Having my own (part of a) server is pretty sweet, too bad it isn’t Java hosted.

My hosting provider is bhosted, a PHP/mysql provider in the Netherlands, and I find the service pretty decent until now. Yes, the domain registration could be smoother, but I doubt it is any worse than other providers.

I wanted to preserve my old blog entries and migrate them to my new home. Unfortunately the wordpress installation doesn’t have a connection to jroller to download all posts and import them. So I searched the internets and found more people facing this problem.

Finally I settled on exporting my entries using the wordpress xml format, and thus preserving the comments made by other people on my blog. I then only had to go through 250+ posts to recategorize them (jroller didn’t put blog entries with category ‘java/wicket’ on the front page).

I really have to thank Zeusville for his efforts in creating the Wordpress export template for jroller.