A Wicket Diary

I just spent 10 minutes figuring out how to call the thing where you cook a lasagna in: a baking dish.

With Apache Wicket’s graduation extravaganza last week, we are settling down again and contemplating what needs to be done to establish ourselves on the Apache grounds of http://wicket.apache.org.

We already knew that our framework was pretty decent, but hearing mostly positive comments on a usually web framework hostile forum as The ServerSide.com, is really comforting.

You can monitor the progress here: JIRA-675 as we progress through the issues.

Probably the hardest part will be to migrate all subscribers the the Wicket User list that is still hosted on sourceforge.net. We will see if you all need to re-subscribe to the Wicket user list or if the only action you need to take is changing your gmail filter.

While perusing a series covering a business model based on the Amazon S3 software service I came across the following quote:

Outsiders do not realise how deeply technological development, like scientific research, is shaped and driven by emotion. [...] The reason that half of us are in computing at all is that we see computers as things that we can make beautiful things out of

And that really sums up my emotion when I am building creating software.

We are still working hard to get a beta release of (Apache) Wicket 1.3 out the door in the next weeks. We have to receive some license grants of a couple (2 iirc) persons before we can ship the release.

In the mean time we have our own server (kindly provided by Servoy) provide us with a confluence and JIRA setup for Wicket Stuff, and best of all: Bamboo for building and pushing new development builds to the box. The installation of Bamboo on the server and hooking it up provided a push for fixing our builds. Johan, Igor and Frank have worked hard to get the build to complete.

This means that we finally have running 1.3 examples. If you want to see the latest and greatest in action, you can look here:

• Bamboo builds for the build status
• Live Wicket 1.3 examples
• Wicket 2.0 examples (still needs work to be deployed successfully)

As you can see, Wicket 1.3 is maturing and getting stable. We will be able to ship it soon and let you enjoy the new features, and visit our new, temporary, home at Apache.

As a member of the Wicket team, I would like to express our gratitude towards Atlassian for providing their software gratis to the Wicket community.

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.