System Mobile, Inc

Looks like Wicket 1.1 was quietly released over the weekend. Congrats to the Wicket team.

nick Uncategorized

Java Lobby has a forum thread about Andreessen’s comments at a Zend conference, stating that PHP will beat Java. Now, I’ve heard Marc’s presentations at various conferences, and he’s quite the whore when it comes to telling the audience what they want to hear. Keep in mind that he was at the Zend conference, and his latest Web2.0 thing is all PHP-based. What do you really expect him to say?

nick Uncategorized

It looks like there’s another group trying to unify the Java web framework space. At least I think that’s what they’re doing. Either way, I’m still a pending member and there’s a poll determining who should be allowed into the group, so whether I’ll be allowed to contribute or just heckle here has yet to be determined.

There is no talk of that they’re trying to accomplish, but there’s been talk of setting up a wiki. And nothing makes you feel more productive than mindlessly typing into a wiki.

nick Uncategorized

Don posted to the struts-user mailing list about a conglomeration of web application frameworks: Spring MVC, Struts, WebWork and Beehive. The idea is that instead of duplicating efforts, the four teams could combine their super powers to create (stop me if you’ve heard it) a new web framework. They decided on ‘Project Clarity’ for the name, but I think that’s a bit too lofty. Why not ‘Project Voltron?’ Or ‘United Nations Security Council?’

While I like the idea of combining the frameworks, I’m skeptical about the reality of this venture. Four different groups with their own legacy code and sacred cows are expecting to work together in a blissful world of harmonious open source web goodness? Unlikely.

There really aren’t any details about the project, so I probably shouldn’t be such a pessimist. However, I’ve been waiting on improvements to Struts Classic for well over a year, with nothing to show for it. (Sorry, JSF isn’t an improvement.) My fear is that Project Clarity will be nothing but layer upon layer of abstraction to support things like JSTL and OGNL, and Velocity and JSP.

I’m sure I’ll become more pessmistic once additional details emerge.

nick Uncategorized

It’s been a few months since I first posted about Wicket, and now that I’m over the initial learning curve, I’m very happy with it. Everything that I’ve been able to do with Struts has been solved with Wicket, although slightly differently. With Struts, a difficult problem is typically solved with a custom ActionMapping, ActionForm, or RequestProcessor. Wicket still requires you to create new objects, but it feels like less of a hack than with Struts. Wicket is more extensible than other web frameworks I’ve tried.

Not that there aren’t some warts. Border components seem to be a little buggy with things like the DatePicker. As I’ve mentioned before, example documentation is still rough, but the mailing list is very helpful. Markup inheritance works very well, and, coupled with Panels, is an excellent solution to forms with varying numbers of elements. A number of people are looking for best practices for integrating things like Spring, Hibernate and iBATIS, and hopefully that will be addressed on the wiki. (Thankfully, the wiki has a new home.) Other than the Border bit, none of these are code issues.

Release candidate 1 has been out for a few weeks. I’m anticipating RC2 shortly. Not for bugfixes, but for improved AJAX support and features. Wicket’s made me more productive, which has allowed more time for golf.

nick Uncategorized

This is a nice page that tells you which browsers and versions support CSS features. Interesting display.

nick Uncategorized