adam bien's blog

Wicket 1.4rc1 + Netbeans 6.5 = The Dream Team 📎

The Wicket Plugin became available directly from the plugin manager today. If your Netbeans is already running (as in my case - for two weeks without rebooting), you will have to hit the "Reload Catalog" button. The installation experience:

  1. The installation is very smooth. Just search for "Wicket" and install the two plugins. Total size: 9 MB.
  2. You will exceptionally have to restart the IDE afterwards.
  3. If you create a Java EE Web Project, just select the wicket framework support.

...and you will gain:

  1. Netbeans will setup Wicket libraries (1.4rc1) in your project and the Wicket Filter correctly in web.xml:

    2. <web-app version="2.5" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd">
        <filter>
            <filter-name>WicketApplication</filter-name>
            <filter-class>org.apache.wicket.protocol.http.WicketFilter</filter-class>
            <init-param>
                <param-name>applicationClassName</param-name>
                <param-value>com.abien.wicket.Application</param-value>
            </init-param>
            </filter>
        <filter-mapping>
            <filter-name>WicketApplication</filter-name>
            <url-pattern>/wicket/*</url-pattern>
        </filter-mapping>
        <session-config><session-timeout>
                30
            </session-timeout></session-config>
        <welcome-file-list>
            <welcome-file/>
        </welcome-file-list>
     </web-app>

  2. It will create a skeleton for a Wicket application with Hello, Header, Home pages, implemented Application, a stylesheet etc.
  3. Really interesting is the support for switching between HTML pages with a given ID and corresponding Java files (Ctrl + click on the wicket id in HTML files). This saves a lot of time.
  4. The creation of pages is useful as well: Netbeans will create for you the HTML and corresponding Java files in parallel.
  5. Best of all: you can customize the templates in: Menu Tools --> Templates --> Web  (Wicket).
  6. The deployment works perfectly with Glassfish v2 and v3
Netbeans has really good support for HTML editing and Database, CSS - even with preview. The "deploy on save" feature is useful for wicket development either. Netbeans, however, does not recognize changed HTML files in the Source Packages folder yet (changes in the Web Pages folder are correctly recognized).

Special thanks to Geertjan Wielenga. It started with a conversation between Poznan and Gdansk at Netbeans world tour, and ended with a supported version of Wicket plugin in Netbeans :-). That's real community effect :-)

Btw. Wicket 1.4 works perfectly with EJB 3 in GF v2 - stay tuned.