Giving courses concerning Wicket is booming business. Mr. Smith (a.k.a. Nick Heudecker) just returned from a course in Copenhagen, and Matej Knopp also dived into the nightlife of Copenhagen to give a course at a different company. And just today I concluded a one day course for a company where I crammed all Wicket knowledge into one 6 hour presentation together with some live demo-ing.

In preparing my course, I had to return to the basics, as the audience had no prior experience in developing web applications, or Java applications altogether. Even though their exposure to the Java language was limited to the Java course they received in the last weeks, I think I got most of Wicket's concepts through. They now have three days to work with Spring (new for them), Hibernate (new for them) and Wicket (also new) and get acquainted with the tools of the trade.

Just as Nick told, the concept of the infamous Wicket Model is the toughest part to explain. In preparing for this course I have found more and better ways of explaining them, and will incorporate that into the Models chapter in our book. I also found that the concepts of IDataProvider (and ISortStateLocator, IFilterStateLocator) are also pretty hard: they cover a lot of ground and concepts, therefore making them difficult to grasp at first.

All in all, these are good times for Wicket:

  • these last two weeks have introduced yet 24 more people to the dark arts of Wicket.
  • almost 100,000 downloads for the Wicket project at SourceForge
  • approximate 500 subscribers to the user list
  • Wicket 1.3 is already put to the test in a production system (75-100 concurrent users) and it still hasn't even had a release!
  • Job listings for Wicket are rising
  • And finally: we're getting a new design for our Apache based website