Wicket is looking particularly exciting at the moment. Why? Is it because Wicket 1.3 is nearly ready to take its first steps into the world? Or is it because Wicket in Action will be out soon? Nope. What’s really exciting is the way the community is taking off.
Becoming an Apache project, with all the benefits that brings, has not gone unnoticed by the wider Java development community. Particularly within the enterprise, the Apache brand (and ASF license) seems to bring with it a promise of professionalism and confidence. A bunch of banks and corporates now list it on their job advertisements, including the likes of Nokia and Time Warner. Despite the explosion in attention, the signal-to-noise ratio on the mailing lists remains impressively high. People are being really helpful both there and also with bug reports and patches, so a big thank you from all us Wicket developers to all you folk out there in the community who are making this growth in interest both workable and sustainable.
Talking of explosions, there has been a staggering level of interest in community meet-ups. When Cemal and I founded the London Wicket User Group a few months back (next meeting Dec 5th) we both hoped the concept would take off elsewhere, so we’re happy to see the vast number of other groups forming across the globe, in a quite astonishing number of places: Antwerp, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, London, Minneapolis, Rio de Janeiro, Seattle, San Francisco, Stockholm, and also somewhere TBC in Austria. I’m surprised there’s not one in New York City yet. Come on guys! ;-)
The Amsterdam meet-up on November the 30th is looking particularly awesome (80 people registered interest, which will probably equate to 50+ people). The level of Wicket expertise gathered in one room will be unprecedented - get yourself along if you possibly can.
For more information, check out the wiki page: Apache Wicket community meet-ups.
Go Wicket!
I’ve updated the Wicket Guice integration project with some new features. The last of the following wasn’t quite done in time to make the upcoming Wicket 1.3.0-rc1 release, but the other features listed here are in. They are:
- Support for Provider<T> -based injection.
- Support for TypeLiteral<T> -based injection.
- A GuiceWebApplicationFactory, so you can make your WebApplication subclass Guice-managed (see the javadoc for details).
My thanks to JR Boyens for getting the ball rolling on the the first two (WICKET-1063).
Do try it out and give me feedback on configuration issues if it doesn’t quite suit you, preferably so I can fix them for you before the rc2 release.
People seem to have problems getting started with Wicket using the Maven 2 archetype quickstart. In an effort to make this as obvious as possible, I’ve created a screencast showing you how to do it, explaining each step in detail along the way. It’s done from a pretty-much virgin installation, so there are no bits of magic here.
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Cemal and I have been working hard refining jWeekend’s upcoming Getting Started With Apache Wicket 1.3 and Apache Wicket 1.3 courses. They’re scheduled for September 22nd and September 29th-30th respectively.
They’re an excellent way to get up to speed with Wicket and develop an in-depth understanding of Models, Behaviors, the AJAX functionality, advanced validation, etc., etc. As such, they will be useful to you whether you’re a beginner or a fairly seasoned Wicket programmer, so I’d encourage you to visit the jWeekend site for more information and to see just what you’ll be getting. We’ll be using the latest 1.3.0-beta3, so you’ll be brought bang up-to-date and ready to develop against the imminent 1.3.0 final release.
I’ve put together some interesting material on making really shiny forms with Wicket. I’ll be presenting it tomorrow at the fourth London Wicket Users Group event, which is being hosted by Skills Matter in Clerkenwell. See the jWeekend registration page for more details.