Customer Reviews

Wicket in Action

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

I already bought this book before it was released. I love wicket and this book sure makes it easier to work with Wicket. It gives you a great in depth view on how wicket works. Adding more and more complexity in all the different chapters.

A needed read for anyone who wants to get the most out of Wicket.

I attended a presentation by Jonathan Locke on Wicket about two years ago and I purchased this book at that time. I didn't bother to read it in depth until recently as the company I was working for went down a different path for web development. While I have a lot of experience with MVC based frameworks (such as Struts, Spring MVC), I didn't get a chance to explore any of the component based frameworks (which is where Wicket belongs). Recently I picked this book up again and read it from cover to cover. This book is extremely well written and makes a very good read for novices and intermediate users of Wicket. I tried all the examples in this book and they worked for the most part although I did have to make a few changes to the source code since I am using a later version of Wicket (1.4). I especially liked the strict separation of presentation and logic that is enforced by Wicket. Figures, code samples and explanation complement each other very well in this book. Wherever relevant the authors point out multiple ways of doing the same thing - for example in chapter 7 composing your pages - the authors explain three different ways of achieving the same effect and point out the pros and cons of each. The chapter on resusable custom components includes a pretty good example to encourage folks to think in that direction when appropriate. This book also includes a chapter on authentication and another chapter on testing both of which are very helpful. The last chapter on configuring the application for production has a section on optimizing URLs for search engines as well as different URL encoding strategies which I thought was pretty neat. After spending couple of weeks on this book, I put together a relatively small application with Wicket for a product we are building in my present position and demonstrated to few folks and they seemed happy with it. To supplement this book, I ordered Apache Wicket Cookbook from Amazon. Hopefully we will be building some wicket apps going forward. Wicket also provides integration with other popular front end Javascript frameworks such as Dojo, YUI - checkout wicketstuff.org which has plethora of examples for the interested. Highly recommended.

I've read a lot of technical books, especially in Java. Starting with the likes of Core Java back in the 1.0/1.1 days and continuing on through Tapestry e-books, Spring, Hibernate... you name it.

I've been brushing up on my Wicket and wanting to get back up to speed on it after a 2 year break and knew about Wicket in Action -- I was specifically nervous about picking up a book that only covered Wicket 1.3 and 1.4, with 1.5 having been out for a while now and future versions coming out all the time. I was really hung up on not getting old material so I wouldn't "learn the wrong/unoptimized way" of doing stuff.

Suffice it to say, I finally got the book and love it -- Wicket is such a mature project, that a good 65% of the book is covering core/fundamental Wicket stuff that will apply no matter what version you are using (assuming 2.0 isn't some rewrite).

Not only that but the authors are really excellent writers. They have a light hearted way about them that make the reading easy, logical and perfectly descript to understand their points without reading and re-reading paragraphs.

I'm enjoying reading this book quite a bit and highly recommend it to anyone interested in Wicket. The online forums and tutorials are excellent supplemental information -- but this book gives you the whole genesis story of Wicket... why it was created, what problem it solves, why parts of it are designed the way they are and so on.

I've been hung up on 'Models' in Wicket for about 2 years now and I finally realized why the other night -- I've always assumed that the *model* was a storage of information, in the classic sense... last night in Chapter 3 it clarifies "The model can really be though of more as a PROXY, or an object that knows how to GET you the data for the component".

Once I read that, all this "PropertyModel" and "CompoundPropertyModel" stuff made WAYYY more sense to me.

There's a very good chance I'm functionally retarded, but I still found that clarification hugely helpful for my mental map... others may as well.

Overall an excellent book, pick up a copy if you are on the fence and if you are worry about learning "outdated material", don't. There is so much core stuff in here, even covering the newer AJAX functionality, that it's all pretty much applicable even for Wicket 1.5/1.6

Courtesy of Piotr Przybylak from Warszawa JUG ([...]):

"Wicket in Action" is a guide on building web applications with Wicket framework, which is very fresh and outstanding solution compared to what is available on the market now. So is the book itself. Most IT books I have read are usually just descriptions of features of a given technology.
"Wicket in action" is one of very few books, that instead guides you by the hand through the learning process, and tries to answer most of the questions that appear in the reader's mind while following the content of the book. This approach is even more valuable in the light of the fact that many things in Wicket are counter-intuitive at first for developers used to classic MVC frameworks.

Material in the book is divided into four parts:
- Getting started with Wicket
- Ingredients for your Wicket applications
- Going beyond Wicket basics
- Preparing for the real world

Following the parts (and chapters) of the book in order, which is recommended approach for Wicket newbies, will not only expose you to Wicket features and APIs, but also enable you to get insight on reasons for designing Wicket the way it is, and ideas behind it, as well as how to use it efficiently and how to integrate it with other technologies such as Hibernate and Spring to create fully functional application. This practical approach probably comes from authors' background. They involved in developing Wicket itself, but also, which may be more important, they use it as a tool in they day jobs. Reading this book you will enable you to both play with a new way of building web application, and to create production ready, user and developer friendly product. It's a must read for everyone interested in web frameworks landscape, even if they are currently not planning working with Wicket in near future.

This book is by far the easiest way to learn the Wicket framework for Java web applications. However, there are still points where the book stubbornly refuses to define specialized terms. Moreover, with the release of Wicket 1.4, the book is now outdated. Because Wicket has migrated to using generics, just about every piece of code has to be slightly modified in order to run on the new version.

After playing with Wicket for a while, I found it to be a very clever framework with a friendly community (if one that hasn't yet produced the kind of cohesive documentation available for more popular frameworks like Spring), but ultimately decided to migrate to Grails, which is newer but already more popular, with several excellent books available for it (the most up-to-date being The Definitive Guide to Grails, Second Edition). Wicket is a more minimalist framework, while Grails allows for seamless integration of the database with the interface. If you're committed to using Wicket, you should definitely get this book. But if you're looking to try the hottest new web framework, try Grails.

This is the first programming book that I can remember since the old Windows Programming book by Charles Petzold that really was a satisfying read. Its probably not as polished as some books but it makes up for that in its concise and effective style that is extremely rare in Java programming books. I'm looking forward to applying everything I have learned. Go Wicket!

I have been developing with Wicket for a year or so. When I started working with Wicket I didn't have a good book as a reference. The community is very helpful in this case. In the mailing list you can sometimes see the two writers of this book. Their responses are very helpful. And so is the book.
The book covers a lot of theoretical Wicket stuff, which I think is very useful if one wants to understand it better.
The book is great for a newcomer as well. Just follow the examples and you'll understand Wicket.
I found the book very useful to me, an intermediate / expert Wicket developer.
Each time I read a few pages or a chapter, I learn something new.
I recommend this book to anyone that uses Wicket or plan to use it.