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.

In the true tradition of photo documenting the unboxing of fabulous products that arrive in boxes, I took lots of pictures during the unboxing event of the very first Wicket in Action delivery.

I tried to build up the tension with photographing the outside of the box, ensuring good depth of field, and then opening up the box, showing barely a glimpse of the contents. And I finished with a couple of alternative uses for when you are done reading.

If you have ordered your copy and not yet received it, be patient—getting the prints of a book first is a writer’s prerogative.

The open source GIS server project called GeoServer has chosen Apache Wicket for their web interface. I’ve been following their progress through the Nabble archives from a distance and saw them reach a formidable milestone today. David Winslow writes:

Hey all, I have reached my goal of >40% test coverage for all wicket modules (hooray!).

This is a great achievement and I hope for a bright future for the Wicket and GeoServer combination!

All the long waiting, even the last two weeks will soon be over: I’ve received confirmation that (disasters notwithstanding) next wednesday, August 13th 2008 the Wicket in Action e-book will become available for download for those that have already bought it.

The Manning team and us have been working slavishly to get Wicket in Action ready for print. Undoubtedly there will be errata, bugs, missing stuff etc. But we did everything we can to ensure the book is delivered to you in the high quality standards that Manning books are known for.

This is a good time to thank the kind and hard working folks of our publishing team:

• Tiffany Taylor,
• Elizabeth Martin,
• Mary Piergies,
• Dottie Marsico
• Dennis Dalinnik,
• Cynthia Kane and
• Peter Thomas

They’ve put in an enormous amount of effort, sweat and (I hope not too many) tears to get our book to the printer. Thank you!