Posts Tagged Apache Wicket

<p>Wicket in Action, by Martijn Dashorst and Eelco Hillenius, is a great book about a good and mature web framework called Wicket. The book wastes no time and dives right in, explaining all aspects of web development with nicely documented examples.</p> <p>Web frameworks have come a long way. As with any type of user interface, they are evolving fast and there are many different ones around. Choosing the right one becomes more difficult because of that. The main reasons for using Wicket should be:</p> <ul> <li>the nice separation of logic and layout, allowing interaction designers and developers to work together efficiently;</li> <li>the natural way in which you can develop your applications in Java, using patterns familiar from other UI frameworks such as Swing;</li> <li>the component friendly architecture, which allows easy integration of Wicket in component frameworks such as OSGi and derivatives like Spring.</li> </ul> <p>The area where Wicket shines are complex, highly dynamic websites and applications.</p> <p>What’s good about this book is that it is written in a very easy going style and still covers all aspects of Wicket well. You can both read it front to back, in which case a cheese store website will keep popping up, showcasing all features as they are explained. Diving right in worked well for me too, directly going to the chapters containing the topics I was interested in.</p> <p>The book is well structured, starting with the basics and covering important topics like internationalization, all aspects of securing your website, maintainability, compatibility with all kinds of browsers using advanced features like Ajax based interaction with fallbacks in case browsers don’t allow any Javascript. It also explains how to debug your site and how to write efficient automated tests that hook into Wicket directly. Some of that stuff is interesting even if you don’t use Wicket.</p> <p>If you’re looking for a book that gives you a good background on developing highly dynamic websites in Java, I can definitely recommend reading Wicket in Action. It’s a good addition to the online documentation found on their website and definitely entertaining.</p>