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:

<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

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.