our existing static website, which was "pre-rendered" locally using fmpp,
if you come from fmp pro then maybe www.servoy.com is something then?
Servoy 3 uses wicket under de hood for its webpart.
I've spend a couple of time to take a look at different web-application
frameworks (incl. wicket) and, to be honest, all seem to lack in one or
another area.
that is i think that you can't have it all, especially when compared to rich gui development.
(1) I want to use plain HTML files at design-time, so I can use a WYSIWYG
editor like DreamWeaver to edit. IMHO, this only is possible with either
special comments or using id-attributes like wicket does.
wicket shines in this ofcourse.
(2) I want to be able to use a directory structure for the templates, e.g.
www.company.com/index.page
www.company.com/product1/features.page
www.company.com/product2/features.page
What do you mean? What you see in the url should also map exactly to that path on disc on the server?
Why would you have that? You should think in development how you orginize everything. Urls shouldn't push that,
that is just the outside world.
But in wicket you have multiply options where youre resources can be. They can sit in the classes dir or in the webroot dir
preferred is that the package structure of the java files are mapped into the resources dir. classes dir is preferred by wicket anyway
And i like that also because you have then 2 or more files (i18n property files) that belong to each other right besides each other.
(3) Even at design-time, relative paths to images or the style-sheet should
be valid, so IDEA can verify their existence and image size. This requires
the page templates to be in the same directory structure as the images and
style-sheet.
it doesn't require that, you can use relative paths: "../../../../style.css" for this and then have wicket convert that to the right
css url at runtime.
(4) Easy embedding of commonly used components like page headers, navigation
bars or footers. The best would be to place these "snippets" into a separate
directory structure, but if they are using graphics, they should also be
able to use correct design-time relative paths.
These can be stand alone components that you add to youre pages or with headers and footers that are on all pages
you could use page inheritance.
(5) It should be very easy to turn links, e.g. used in the menu bar snippet,
into "smart links". If pointing to the current page, they must not be
rendered as a link, but the look should be customizable (wicket seems to use
italics in this situation).
yes if a link sees that it points to him self it can disable itself.
(6) Detection of errors (e.g. wrong links) should be as early as possible.
there aren't much deadlinks in wicket where wicket generates the url for. Because that generation mostly
maps to him self or to a bookmarkable page which should be there.
johan
