Wicket in Action 1st Edition

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.

After horrible Lift in Action: The Simply Functional Web Framework for Scala I had high hopes for this book, because I couldn't stand another failure. I am glad I wasn't disappointed. Except for introductory chapter ("all in one") the rest is presented in problem after problem pattern -- issues are fully explained IN the book, you don't have to download anything to get full picture. The examples are easy to understand, and the their scope is small which is good. I could only complain about over explaining real part of the story (it is shop with cheese, and quickly it becomes boring to read about this or that cheese, or how to make a lasagna).

For me it is also a big plus this book is about Wicket, not about everything that Wicket is even remotely related to (like half of the book for ORM libraries; such topics -- ORM, DI, testing -- are touched, but that's it). On the downside several core Wicket issues are also lightly touched or not mentioned at all. Namely -- let's start from minor topics:

* overview of MVC vs. Wicket is cut off -- MVC it just described and instead of comparison it ends up with sudden conclusion Wicket is better; reader interested in design of frameworks will be really disappointed (I am)
* "dynamic" page (hiding/showing part of it) is presented using Ajax -- what about pure JS, because Ajax seems like overkill
* Ajax calling -- on-error handling is just mentioned, on-submit is probably not mentioned (because it is described as submit-completed event; p.253)
* differences between Wicket links are not fully explained -- I rather guess, than rely on what I've read
* I didn't see how you can customize URL composing -- Wicket by default creates some scary ones, and the first you would probably like to do is to make them user-readable
* a nasty mistake is using plain passwords in authentication chapter -- I know, the books serves rather as an example, but even examples should not teach bad habits

Adding to this few mistakes like stating that "we are extending Stateless form to make page stateful" (p.271) does not change my opinion about this book. It is hard to be perfect. However more serious problems exist too.

The authors spend a lot of time (too much for my taste) for introductions, summaries, lengthy analogies. Let's say you have a chapter titled "Authorization". Is this really necessary to explain to reader that this chapter will be about (... I feel your excitement ...) authorization (who would guess, ha?). Come on... half of the page (or more)? This is especially annoying, when you face the publisher rip-off, but we come to that.

So for introductions to introductions there was space, but for adding chapter about web service (is Wicket suitable to build one? or use one? how?), data validation (the authors describe the validation is performed by Wicket, but crucial point is -- on which side? client? server? or both?) there was no space. There was no space for very basic thing -- thoroughly explaining how to setup WWW server with Wicket (emphasis on "thoroughly").

This ends up my review about the content as information -- for this I can give 4/5. There 3 things more to cover though -- the longer you read, more tired you get. Despite every -- even free -- editor has now syntax highlighting, such invention somehow was missed by publisher, so all code is printed in plain same font (Courier?) -- no matter if it is a keyword or not. Authors do not help in this department either -- instead of building code piece by piece, which is very desired when explaining anything, they go with on-fly class constructing (guys, the fact the feature exists in the language does not mean you have to use it). As the result you are struggling with dissecting a method which creates on-fly a class, which has method, which creates on-fly a class which has a method... OMG. Great for mind puzzle, quite contrary if you have to understand it, and find that closing brace which matches the one you are looking at.

I hope in second edition we get a class definition, then a class which uses it, then a class... One at a time.

OK, time for really sad part. You are buying a book, once you paid, you own the book. Every page is yours, no matter how often you read it. So you can say, that you have your reading for free (after you already spent the money). And here Manning comes with revelation -- you have ADDITIONAL chapter for free (actually it is not additional chapter -- setup -- it is essential part of the book, it was simply removed from the printed book). The chapter you would normally think it is already there, because you -- as I said -- paid for it. But you see, printing books is expensive business, and Manning figured it out how to cut the costs. Instead of printing it, they make you to download it. Now, in order to read the book, you have to print the chapter by yourself, or keep ebook-reader next to the book, in order to read whole content. If you don't get the scheme Manning pulled out here, here is the analogy -- you bought Encyclopedia Britannica, but after purchase you found out B- and C- entries are not printed, you have to download them and use them as an ebook. "FOR FREE", you see.

THIS IS FRAUD, THIS IS STEALING. PUBLISHER (MANNING) CHEATS. Since the review is for the book as a whole piece -- 3/5. Idea that I print additional chapter, and glue it somehow to the book, to make it look like A-Z guide, is ridiculous (especially considering I paid for the book, not for DIY, I want-to-be-a-publisher toy).

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.