2008/7/12 Kent Larsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I just thought I'd ask about which is the preferred way of learning > Wicket 1.4? Personally I've always been a fan of getting a good book, > reading it and doing the examples/exercises. As there are only three > books published on Wicket, and two of them relates to Wicket 1.3, I'm > wondering if there are lots of differences between 1.3 and 1.4 and if > I should wait for an updated book? >
It's well worth picking up a copy of Wicket in Action. There is basically no difference between 1.3 and 1.4 apart from the addition of generics. Updating a 1.3 project to use 1.4 is therefore really trivial. I'd get a copy of Wicket in Action, have a play around with Wicket 1.3, then maybe try out Wicket 1.4M2 if you're keen to see the direction things are going in. Bear in mind it's a pre-release version and things may change. Don't wait for an updated book. Firstly there's no point. Secondly you'll probably be waiting a little while - the first edition of WIA has only recently come off the presses. There was some (old) posts about memory problems. I'm planning to > write an application which will have roughly 1000 users, the > application is pretty simple and they mostly input text into forms and > view text from the database. In other words, there won't be much > application logic. I was wondering about the current state of Wicket > when it comes to performance in terms of CPU and memory usage? How > does it compare to using plain Servlets+JSP and how does it compare to > JSF? 1000 users? Or 1000 simultaneous users? The latter is obviously the more important metric. The short answer is to try it and see, and do some load-testing so you know how your app will behave if it suddenly gets swamped with traffic. People successfully use Wicket on much larger scale sites than that. People worry far too much about performance, far too early, usually with no good reason. You sound like one of these people. Write it, test it, tweak it, in that order. There are tools in Wicket to optimise things (stateless pages, etc.) so you can achieve the same kind of level of performance and scalability as raw servlets if you need it. > One of the things I liked about the Wicket examples was their > simplicity and that it felt you as a developer was in total control of > what's going in the output which the client reads. I saw that there > are AJAX components now, and I'm wondering when/if I should use them? > I was planning to use the JavaScript library jQuery for dynamic > content. But when it comes to fetching/posting XML from/to the server > that sort of interaction might be best suited for the native > components? What I'm afraid of is some sort of situation where I do > not control the output as much any more. > AJAX in Wicket is generally trivial to implement using the built-in support. You're obviously not far enough down the road here for me to say much more. Look at some of the AJAX examples to see how things work. You probably don't need control in the way you think you do, Wicket will likely take care of most of it for you without you ever having to write a line of JavaScript. > Should I use Wicket 1.4 instead of 1.3? You already asked this. See above. > Lastly I'm wondering about Maven2. I looked at it a while ago but it > seemed too complex for me wanting to learn it. Are both ways of > retrieving Wicket equal or is there any reason to prefer one of them > (maven2/normal jar-download) for me as a user? It doesn't really make any difference. Maven 2 will make your life slightly easier - it's quicker and easier to upgrade your project between versions, easier to add Spring or whatever. Most people really like it and won't go back once they've started using it. It's really not very hard to use. For example, see here: http://herebebeasties.com/2007-10-07/wicket-quickstart/(although it's become easier since then - there's a copy/paste widget on the wicket web site to generate the command line for the archetype stuff now). Q4E is good if you're using Eclipse with it. Best regards, Alastair
