Wicket in Action (Paperback)

by Martijn Dashorst (Author), Eelco Hillenius (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
There are dozens of Java frameworks out there, but most of them require you to learn special coding techniques and new, often rigid, patterns of development. Wicket is different. As a component-based Web application framework, Wicket lets you build maintainable enterprise-grade web applications using the power of plain old Java objects (POJOs), HTML, Ajax, Spring, Hibernate and Maven. Wicket automatically manages state at the component level, which means no more awkward HTTPSession objects. Its elegant programming model enables you to write rich web applications quickly.

Wicket in Action is an authoritative, comprehensive guide for Java developers building Wicket-based Web applications. This book starts with an introduction to Wicket's structure and components, and moves quickly into examples of Wicket at work. Written by two of the project's earliest and most authoritative experts, this book shows you both the "how-to" and the "why" of Wicket. As you move through the book, you'll learn to use and customize Wicket components, how to interact with other technologies like Spring and Hibernate, and how to build rich, Ajax-driven features into your applications.

About the Author
Martijn Dashorst is a software engineer with over 10 years of experience in software development. He has been actively involved in the Wicket project since it was open sourced, and has presented Wicket as a speaker at numerous conferences, including JavaOne and JavaPolis.

Eelco Hillenius is an experienced software developer who has been part of Wicket's core team almost from the start. He works for Teachscape where he helping to build the next elearning platform. A Dutch native, he currently lives in Seattle.

Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: Manning Publications (September 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932394982
• ISBN-13: 978-1932394986
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #133,003 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #1 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Localization
  #32 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Microsoft > Web Browsers

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book!, September 23, 2008

By	Dan Syrstad - See all my reviews

This is a great book that really gives a in-depth overview of Wicket. I've been working with Wicket for a couple of years and had to suffer through figuring things out from examples and mailing lists. This book is the definitive guide. I've already learned several new things from it. Many thanks to the authors who went to great lengths to get this book out!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well written, in-depth coverage, September 25, 2008

By	M. Pilone (Silver Spring, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I don't normally review books on Amazon but this is one of the best technical books that I've read in a while. The authors do a great job of organizing and presenting the material. The book is easy to read and I was able to get through it in about two evenings. I'm now using it as a reference while I work on my first major Wicket application. It might help that Wicket itself is well structured which makes the concepts that much easier to understand.

That being said, there are a few short-comings:
1) The cheese and lasagna examples get really old really quickly. The authors could have used different concepts or something a little more relevant or interesting to most developers.

2) The book is somewhat short. While they covered the core topics well, I felt that a few things we missing. I was surprised to see that the publisher trimmed the book and put an extra chapter online but not in print.

3) Some fundamentals like what DTD to include in an HTML page or what the Wicket web.xml should look like would be nice. You can find these answers online with a quick search but this book should really cover it.

But these faults don't hurt the overall usefulness of the book. It would be nice if most/all of this documentation was available in the Wicket project itself, but no such luck which makes this book even more valuable. I don't know if it will be in all copies, but my copy had a coupon for a free version of the digital book (PDF I suppose)... nice touch.

I recommend buying this book and learning about a very reasonable alternative to JSF.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent introduction and reference to Wicket, February 4, 2009

By	Chris - See all my reviews

I began using Wicket a number of weeks ago, and could easily see from the lack of consistent online documentation, that I'd need a book for the more complicated aspects (such as Form components) and some mundane ones (like localisation). This one proved to be a good choice of book. I started with a rough idea of how things are constructed, but I've learned alot since that I've been able to apply to my own project.

The book is well structured, the examples are clear and the book covers everything from setting up an application, to creating reusable components, to integration with dependency-injection frameworks (albeit only Spring) and provides a good reference for doing everyday things with Wicket.

One thing I really like about this book is that its code samples are very concise and contain very little extra boilerplate. The extra little annotations on the side, pointing out the different parts of the code sample also make it easier to break each down and examine it at a glance.

Another incredibly useful aspect of the book is that many of the things that it points out are actually relevant to web application development, such as the use of Ajax, the creation of custom components, bookmarkable links, authentication (something IMHO missing from many web framework books) and the implications and pitfalls around many design decisions (e.g. the use of model inheritance, on pp93-94). I was very pleased with Ch8 about reusable components as it helped to answer some of the more advanced questions I had when designing my own panels. Its also good to see something on page composition and the different page composition strategies (Ch7).

One thing I found hard to work with was the explanation of the architecture of Wicket in Ch2. My experience with Wicket has not led me to interact with many of the classes mentioned, except during debugging when I've dug right down into the frameworks internals in order to determine what was happening with my own code. It seems like a chapter that you can come back to after you've been reading the book for a while, as its hard to relate to in the context of the rest of the book. This seems to be the case because Wicket's architecture only exposes you to the parts of Wicket that you need to interact with (components, models, pages, panels, behaviours and the Application object) and nothing else.