Well I gave it the old college try, which for me is a couple of hours over a few nights. My biggest issue was lack of downloadable and runnable examples. I’ve been spoiled with the Spring and jQuery documentation. Sure, there are examples, references, and (another link that I can’t find, another part of the problem), but none of them provide a fully downloadable example to take apart and examine.
For me, the component based approach vs action based is new territory. I can’t fault Wicket for my lack of experience, but I wasn’t fully able to hit the ground running. They did have a maven quickstart archetype, found here, and I was able to do a “hello world”, but accomplishing my goals with the provided documentation proved to be too overwhelming. I created at least 4 empty projects to try and accomplish just a similarly working shell of what Sitemesh provides. I wanted to create a simple page using XHTML and CSS with a header, left nav, main, and footer components. Then be able to create another page using the same layout but switch out the footer component with another component, such as an advertisement component which I made a simple PoC for.
Though I did succeed with it for the most part, the large majority of the “template” setup happened in my target page, Product.java for example. I would expect each page to have some type of configuration for each of the components it wishes to involve, but having to maintain the display code, which I think I’m referring to Borders, in there as well felt like I was moving in the wrong direction.
So at this point I’m going to put Wicket on the shelf and take a look at Tapesty. If someone has a robust example of common functionalty, see this link for what I wanted to try, please let me know and I’ll be happy to give it another spin.
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It sounds to me like you didn’t ask for help and got frustrated. The wicket-user mailing list is very helpful and all of the examples are downloadable from the SVN repository like this:
svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/wicket/trunk/wicket-examples
I think you may be passing up a good thing, particularly if you like to think in objects.
BTW, you might also check out the phonebook example in the wicket stuff repo. And from where you’re starting, I’d recommend reading “Wicket in Action” from manning. It’s a very friendly way to get to know Wicket. Anyway, good luck with whatever you choose.
Oh, yeah, that reminds me. You can download the examples from the WIA book here:
http://code.google.com/p/wicketinaction/
I did get frustrated and give up. I tried to download an example, which I think was the phonebook, but the URL was 404. There was another link (that I mentioned but couldn’t find again) that had some good examples but they wouldn’t compile because the “source” view didn’t show all of the classes needed to run it, just some of the related ones. Not having those readily accesible was a huge turn off for me.
I agree that picking up a book like “Wicket in Action” is a good approach to learn a framework (I have a few other “in Action” books on other frameworks), but this was much higher level than that. I didn’t so much want to learn the framework as I wanted to get a feel for it.
As far as help goes, I joined the IRC chatroom and let my client sit there idle for an hour to see the activity level. There were 43 clients present but not one said anything. I assume they were mostly bots.
I haven’t written Wicket off, it’s not Wicket’s shortcoming of why I’m not going to look at it further, it’s mine. But for now I’m going to look at Tapestry to get a high level feel for it too. If I fail with that, then it’s time to go a little deeper, like get a book or something similar.
Thanks for your reply.
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