Wicket in Action

A comprehensive guide for Java developers building Wicket-based web applications

Monitoring your app with a rabid rabbit

March 27th, 2009 by dashorst

In 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

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.

With this book, Wicket will become the greatest territory the Dutch have settled since Manhattan.

Nathan Hamblen
Senior Software Engineer, Teachscape Inc.

This is the complete and authoritative guide to Wicket, written and reviewed by the core members of the Apache Wicket team. If there's anything you want to know about Wicket, you are sure to find it in this book.

Jonathan Locke
Founder and Architect of Apache Wicket, Foreword Wicket in Action

Without question, Wicket in Action... is the be-all and end-all when it comes to Wicket.

Geertjan Wielenga, Wicket Netbeans Plugin Author

The tutorial and conversational tone of the writing makes the book very approachable.

Nick Heudecker
System Mobile

Loved the sample application—it tied everything together.

Phil Hanna
Senior Software Developer, SAS Institute

The essential guide for learning and using Wicket.

Erik van Oosten
Lead programmer and Project Manager, JTeam

Finally, the Web Framework of web frameworks, Apache Wicket, now has a bible of its own.

Per Ejeklint
Senior Software Architect, Heimore group

Wicket is an innovative evolution of the MVC programming with simple roots, but without a primer such as this, it can be more challenging than it needs to be.

Brian Topping
Founder, Bill2 Inc.

Wicket In Action glues the areas of web development with Apache Wicket together and gives a great overview of Apache Wicket...it will make a great compendium.

Nino Martinez Wael
Java Specialist, Jayway Denmark