"When you're building any kind of complex application, you want to re-use as much code as possible. The problem is, you may find yourself stymied by components that are just different enough that you have to build them from scratch. In this second installment in Nathan Hamblen's introduction to Web development with Wicket, you'll see how this open source, component-based Web application framework gets around such problems, greatly reducing the amount of code you need to cut and paste."
"The best persistence technology to bundle with a Web framework might just be none at all. In this final installment in his series on Web development with Wicket, Nathan Hamblen demonstrates how Wicket's independence from any one persistence tool leaves your Web app with lots of options. See what happens when you persist application data in four different combinations of Spring, Hibernate, ActiveObjects, and Databinder."
"Wicket is a lightweight, component-oriented framework that does much to bring the easy, intuitive interfaces found in desktop applications to Java Web development. In this series Nathan Hamblen introduces key aspects of Wicket that differentiate it from other Web application frameworks. If you're new to Wicket, this series will serve as an accessible and engaging introduction; if you're already using the framework you'll have fun with the well-crafted, hands-on exercises. This first article investigates Wicket's virtual state, demonstrating the many ways Wicket accommodates both stateless and stateful Web application development."
"In the above example we create a Model object, which implements the IModel interface, and pass it a string. The org.apache.wicket.model.Model class takes any object implementing java.io.Serializable, so a String works. To use the Model, simply pass it to a component:"
"Wicket recently became an Apache Software Foundation project, and it is approaching a major release. It represents a good option for lightweight, component-oriented web application development using pure Java and object-oriented design principles and patterns."
"Tapestry and Wicket are touted as modern familiar component-based Web frameworks. Unlike the Model 2 architecture frameworks Struts or Spring MVC, Tapestry and Wicket offer a fresh approach to the process of Web development by emphasizing a methodology for thinking about Web applications, their behavior, and component interaction in the same way you think about stand-alone GUI-based applications."
"Double-click the file, and it will open in your favorite browser. Depending upon where you come from (JSP-based frameworks/Tapestry), it could come as a surprise to be able to open your template in a browser and see it render just fine. It must have been a dream sometime back with JSP-based frameworks, but luckily, it's a reality with Wicket. You would be forced to start a web server at minimum when using a JSP-based framework/JSF for that matter. Note that the template has a few instances of a Wicket-specific attribute named wicket:id interspersed here and there (ignored by the browser), but otherwise it is plain vanilla HTML."
