Martijn Dashorst

Originally posted by Nikos Pugunias:
It's really great to see an article about Wicket!

I agree: more content available for Wicket (or any other framework out there) is good.

Shameless plug:

There's a lot more available here: http://wicketinaction.com which is the companion website for Wicket in Action *and* the Wicket community in general. The site is also featuring star committer Igor Vaynberg as a writer for more articles on all things Wicket. His latest article features a ListEditor component to create dynamic forms.

Originally posted by swapnilw wadaganve:
Hi,
I am new to wicket.I am going to start it from scratch but not able to get proper links(help) for wicket along with tutorial.
And books are also not avail in market.
Can you suggest me some linka and book name.

Thanks in advance.

If you searched this forum you'd have come across Wicket in Action. The Wicket website has tutorials, examples, a filled wiki, online examples. The Wicket distribution includes a war with examples and the full source code. The Wicket website has a whole page dedicated to Wicket books.

Google is your friend: http://google.com/search?q=apache+wicket+books.

Originally posted by David O'Meara:
Thanks for the moderate responses. A review is an opinion piece, and while I defend my view I also support the right of others to disagree.

Though I'd rather have that you enjoyed/praised the book, you have every right to be critical of it. I just want to understand why it didn't fit your expectations, not criticize you for being critical.

Knowing your expectations will help others form an opinion whether or not to buy the book. just as "this is the most awesome book ever" won't help, "this just sucks" doesn't either. The why is very important.

Originally posted by Book Review Team:
For me the information came a little too thick and fast, and assumed more existing knowledge than I already had. This made several sections confusing and I had to re-read the section, or a previous section, before being able to understand. It is an advantage having this level of knowledge about the architecture and underlying decisions that made Wicket what it is, but I wasn't sure about the order or rate of delivery.

From this I assume you found it moving too fast, am I correct?

Personally however, I was a little disappointed as it didn't match my requirements or expectations, and I was hoping for more.

What were your requirements and expectations? It is quite difficult to read a negative review, without learning more about what you expected. Did you want more information? Would you have liked the book better if it was 600 pages and contained more information, or went at a slower pace? What were the parts you found missing, what could be improved?

We assume knowledge of a couple of technologies in our book, just like Wicket assumes you know Java. We had to pick our battles and have limited resources (pages and time). We tried to ensure that the absolute beginner would know how to start, tried to provide value when the beginner becomes an intermediate and even to be a reference when the intermediate becomes experienced.

There is just so much information that fits in 400 pages, and we had to make choices. There are a lot of things we'd like to have in the book, but size constraints prevented us from doing so.

Originally posted by Jeanne Boyarsky:
First, a big thanks to Martijn Dashorst & Eelco Hillenius for being here to promote the book Wicket in Action.

Thanks for having us. I enjoyed answering the questions raised here. I'll keep on checking in here to answer questions, but if you have a burning question, you are better off asking on our user list. Like JavaRanch, the Wicket community is friendly and helpful, and you'll reach more than 650 Wicket experts and greenhorns.

Congratulations to Erik, Alaa, Lasse and Sekhar. I hope you will enjoy our book.

Thanks for asking and answering questions! I hope to see some of you (or all of you ) in our community.

And now it is time for

Martijn

Originally posted by Roger Marin:
my question is, how well does wicket work with frameworks like spring, maven(i know it has extensive support unlike GWT), acegi spring security(very important) and hibernate are there any examples in your book of using these technologies together, perhaps a real enterprise - like application using wicket?

Chapter 13 shows how to use Spring/Hibernate/Wicket. Maven is not part of the book, but will come available as a free download (bonus chapter). If you want Maven now, you'll have to read the MEAP, as it still is part of the Wicket in Action MEAP.

We don't go into Spring Security, but I don't think that is very hard to achieve, considering Wicket Swarm has a Wiki document on how to integrate the two technologies. With chapter 11 "Securing your application", you will get all the knowledge necessary to build your own authorization/authentication classes and integrate them with Wicket.

Originally posted by Roger Marin:
Hello,

Does your book cover examples of using a widget framework of something similar with wicket? are there any good widget libraries or frameworks available for wicket anyways? perhaps something like GWT-EXT?

Due to space/time constraints we were unable to include such examples. Added to that the problems of quickly changing popularity (e.g. EXT-JS is not that popular anymore since the recent license change). There is always one or another framework du jour that has to be included, and different people like different toolkits.

There are a lot of folks that really like dojo. I'm not one of them. Others swear by JQuery, and yet others think YUI is 733T. The JavaScript library space is as fragmented as the Java web framework space, so we didn't want to single out one particular library.

The book does cover how you can create rich components yourself. We show how you can include some Javascript library in your Wicket component and quickly make rich components that way.

If you still need more information, please check out the Wicket Stuff repository for integration libraries with all the major JavaScript libraries, and even some specific ones.

[ May 23, 2008: Message edited by: Martijn Dashorst ]

[gdb - fixed the link]
[ May 23, 2008: Message edited by: Gregg Bolinger ]

Originally posted by Tomasz Prus:
How can i prepare url like this: ../London/9.html

I need that city and advertNumber parameters be always at the end of url.

Can You help me?

I think this is answered in your crosspost to the Wicket user list

Originally posted by Tomasz Prus:
Does book describe url coding strategies in detail? I ask because i have problem with this now

I can see that on the user@ list. Please don't go and expect an answer within minutes or even hours. People who answer on the list are volunteers and have to earn their food too.

As for the URL coding strategies, yes we discuss them in chapter 14 (chapter 15 of the MEAP).

Originally posted by Tomasz Prus:
Can we expect some book updates in the future, for example code update to Wicket 1.4 (for download from web)?

I don't know. We might do so. In any case the code is shared on Google code and you are welcome to submit patches

When the book is done, Eelco and I have to get some new friends and family. We haven't been in touch with them for 2 years. So it won't be any time soon (we won't keep it in sync with trunk for example)

Originally posted by Anirudh Vyas:
1.3.x i am guessing ...

And the refrigerator goes to.......... Anirudh!

Wicket 1.3. As the new Wicket version is still under considerable development (and debate) we have targeted this release. (And contrary to popular belief, adjusting a book for a new release is not something for the faint of heart)

Originally posted by Iv�n P�rraga:
Hi,

I've heard that one "problem" with the Wicket framework is that it uses the session to store large amounts of info to keep the state of most renders... I was wondering how this can affect to the performance in a high concurrency environement (specially with respect to the amounts of memory that the J2EE web component must handle).

Cheers,

Iv�n

The rumors of Wicket's extravagant session usage are grosly overrated. It is something that folks remember hearing from cocktail parties, without ever having looked at the actual product.

Yes, Wicket does use serverside memory. Is it much? it depends on your application, how you set up your code, etc. In my experience the second level cache for Hibernate takes up more memory than the Wicket specific items.

In Wicket in Action we provide you with the means to control how much memory you are using. The chapter on models (Chapter 4 in the book, #5 in the MEAP), has a section on using detachable models to save memory usage and to keep things fresh.

I advise you to read the freely available chapter 1 of Wicket in Action - it is great bathroom reading, and contains some explanation of the choices Wicket has made regarding server side state.

Originally posted by Tomasz Prus:
I understand that 350 pages is a constraint. So i would like to ask You what frameworks, utils, libraries etc. maybe some new and modern which do You prefer and recommend? (i think about whole web application development process) The masses needs the leadership

maven (though it can be a pain at times)

wicket

jetty

hibernate (though it can be a pain at times)

spring (though I personally haven't used it in anger)

Java 6

teamcity/hudson

jquery/yui/scriptaculous

wicket

1) Avoid XML hell

check

2) Easily integrate with Spring interfaces

check

3) Really clean view separation (we have a CMS we pull a lot of stuff from and make heavy use of XSL)

check

I think we have your bases covered .

Other then these answers, I'm not sure what you are trying to ask us?

Originally posted by Tomasz Prus:
"15. Putting your Wicket application in production "

Putting web application in production is rarely considered topic in books. Often it is constrained to show a little configuration settings. Does "Wicket in Action" take this issue in more details? What aspects are considered in this chapter?

Test your web user interface

Provide pretty URL�s to your visitors and search engines

Configure your application for optimal performance

Monitor your application in production