| | |  | Computer Security | Home » » Wicket in Action | | | | | | | Product Promotions: | | | | | Description: | | There are dozens of Java frameworks out there, but most of them require you to learn special coding techniques and new, often rigid, patterns of development. Wicket is different. As a component-based Web application framework, Wicket lets you build maintainable enterprise-grade web applications using the power of plain old Java objects (POJOs), HTML, Ajax, Spring, Hibernate and Maven. Wicket automatically manages state at the component level, which means no more awkward HTTPSession objects. Its elegant programming model enables you to write rich web applications quickly. Wicket in Action is an authoritative, comprehensive guide for Java developers building Wicket-based Web applications. This book starts with an introduction to Wicket's structure and components, and moves quickly into examples of Wicket at work. Written by two of the project's earliest and most authoritative experts, this book shows you both the "how-to" and the "why" of Wicket. As you move through the book, you'll learn to use and customize Wicket components, how to interact with other technologies like Spring and Hibernate, and how to build rich, Ajax-driven features into your applications.
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Martijn Dashorst | | Paperback:
| 392 pages | | Publisher:
| Manning Publications | | Publication Date:
| September 09, 2008 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1932394982 | | Product Length:
| 9.18 inches | | Product Width:
| 7.4 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.8 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.5 pounds | | Package Length:
| 9.1 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.3 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.8 inches | | Package Weight:
| 2.0 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 19 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 19 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 found the following review helpful:
 Well written, in-depth coverageSep 26, 2008
By M. Pilone
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.
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
Great Book!Sep 24, 2008
By Dan Syrstad
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!
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
Excellent introduction and reference to WicketFeb 05, 2009
By Chris
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.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Excellent WorkSep 25, 2011
By Siddhardha
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.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Well Written, Excellent Detail and Perfect CoverageJan 20, 2010
By Riyad Kalla
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
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