Wicket in Action review by jduchess
June 23rd, 2009 by dashorstThe Dutch female Java developer community website jduchess has written up a review of Wicket in Action. They provide a nice summary per chapter detailing the contents of each, and conclude:
Wicket in Action is the perfect book if you want to get started with Wicket. [...] It’s also a good book if you’ve already been playing with the framework for a little while and want to really understand what it is you’re working with.
Many thanks go to Linda van der Pal for writing this detailed review!
Get Wicket in Action at 50%
June 17th, 2009 by dashorstManning is celebrating 500 twitter followers with a 50% discount until June 18th: use the coupon code twtr0618 when going through checkout at the Manning online store. This means Wicket in Action for half the price, quite a bargain!
Wicket HTML validator 1.2
June 9th, 2009 by dashorstI just performed the 1.2 release of WicketStuff HTML Validator, thanks to Emond Papegaaij, a Topicus Onderwijs co-worker. This new release adds the ability to ignore Wicket specific bugs when using the & entity in JavaScript calls, and adds the ability to ignore <input type=”text” autocomplete=”false” /> validation errors. Even though you specify that your document is (X)HTML compliant, browsers will (fortunately) still work with these validation errors present.
The markup validator was featured in my presentation “Get your Wicket Application in production (and keep your weekends free)”. The validator will notify you if you have invalid HTML markup in your rendered pages. While usually not destructive, having invalid markup can result in long debugging errors when replacing part of your page with for example Ajax, or traversing the DOM.
You can use it by adding the HtmlValidationResponseFilter to the Wicket
request cycle filters in the following fashion:
public class MyApplication extends WebApplication { // ... @Override protected void init() { // only enable the markup filter in DEVELOPMENT mode if(DEVELOPMENT.equals(getConfigurationType())) { HtmlValidationResponseFilter htmlvalidator = new HtmlValidationResponseFilter(); htmlvalidator.setIgnoreAutocomplete(true); htmlvalidator.setIgnoreKnownWicketBugs(true); getRequestCycleSettings() .addResponseFilter(htmlvalidator); } } }
And you’re all set. Make sure you define a XHTML doctype in your pages, such
as:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Foo</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>To use the HtmlValidator, include the following in your project’s pom:
<dependency> <groupId>org.wicketstuff</groupId> <artifactId>htmlvalidator</artifactId> <version>1.2</version> <scope>test</scope> </dependency>
You might need to add the Wicket Stuff maven repository to your repository list.
Wicket/Spring/Hibernate configuration
June 5th, 2009 by dashorstI like annotations and loathe oodles of XML. To get Spring and Hibernate work with those nice @Transactional, @Service and @Entity annotations by scanning your classpath, the following Spring configuration files should do the trick for your default Wicket Quickstart project (provided you add the necessary Spring and Hibernate dependencies to your setup). Figuring this out took me an evening (especially getting the scanners and @Transactional support up and running), so here’s my setup such that you don’t have to spend the evening yourself:
Read the rest of this entry »
Apache Wicket 1.3.6 released!
May 4th, 2009 by dashorstThe Apache Wicket team is proud to announce the availability of the sixth maintenance release: Apache Wicket 1.3.6. A lot of bugs have been squashed and several improvements implemented. It is recommended you update to Wicket 1.3.6 at your earliest convenience.
Eager people click here to download the distribution, others can read further:
We thank you for your patience and support.
- The Wicket Team
Wicket Paris Meetup was a blast!
May 4th, 2009 by dashorstI just returned from Paris where I was speaking (as the sole presenter!) at the Wicket meetup organized by Zenika. The event was really well organized (champagne before and after) and the audience was kind and attentive. I enjoyed the experience very much. Zenika ét tous qui étaient lá: merçi beaucoup!
Wicket presentation organized by Zenika
Just a couple of tips for folks travelling to Paris: the Thalys service is great. If you have an iPhone, purchase the Paris Metro application and finally avoid going to Paris on May 1st (everything is closed and the french are exercising their national pastime: protesting).
ps. with thanks to my dad who pointed out my bad french language skills…
Talking in Paris tomorrow
April 28th, 2009 by dashorstI’m doing a Wicket in Action talk in Paris (France) tomorrow (Avril 29, 2009) evening, and looking forward to meeting the french Wicket Community. This is a 2 hour event, starting at 18:30 in Club Confair, 51 Rue Laffitte, Paris. You can register online for free! This event is brought to you for free by Zenika.
Monitoring your app with a rabid rabbit
March 27th, 2009 by dashorstIn my talk for the Wicket Meetup in Amsterdam last tuesday, I showed a WiFi Rabbit called Nabaztag. This rabbit is used in our company to monitor our applications, build server and issue tracker.
Nabaztag dressed up for Halloween as a vampire
The rabbit maintains a connection through Wifi with a bunch of servers in France. These servers provide all communication to your rabbit: text-to-speech, MP3, weather reports and internet radio. Letting your rabbit talk is as simple as sending a http request to the central servers. Violet has published the API’s where you can rotate the ears, change the led colors and perform text-to-speech in different voices and languages.
The text-to-speech is really nice, but at times the sounds produced are surprising. Whenever a server goes down, our rabbit(s) start yelling. When a server is slow for our users, the rabbits start protesting. When issues are put in our bug tracker, the rabbit announces the issue, and title. When a build fails, the rabbit shouts in anger at us (but in a very polite, british accent with the voice of mrmuggles). There is a nabaztag plugin for Hudson making it easy to setup the rabbit and build notifications.
You can buy these rabbits for your company, and I promised to put a link to where you can shop for them. Probably at this moment, the Amazon shop is the cheapest option, but you have to have patience if you are in Europe.
Wicket Meetup Amsterdam 2009 video online
March 26th, 2009 by dashorstMost attendees to the Wicket meetup yesterday evening may have noticed the BFC (Big F’ing Camera) that was shooting those annoying pictures. These pictures made a very nice short movie (using iPhoto’09). If you were not able to attend for one reason or another, here’s a short impression and see for yourself why you should attend next time! (click the movie for a HD version)
Apache Wicket Meetup 2009 Amsterdam from Martijn Dashorst on Vimeo.
Follow Wicket on twitter
March 18th, 2009 by dashorstWicket can now be followed on twitter (found through Wicket twitter search).