Qwicket 1.0 is finally here. Apart from being entirely too busy with work and sick children, I’ve been anxiously waiting along with everyone else for the 1.3 release to go final. This version features some streamlined build process improvements and a more interesting default UI. You’ll likely end up building a new UI but at least there’s enough there to work with while your design guys build something more customized. Part of the delay has come from some odd compiling and generation problems in my development environment but I appear to have ironed all those out. If you see something odd, please don’t hesitate to let me know and I’ll try to iron out any issues as quickly as possible.
This release isn’t entirely revolutionary but I hope to make some dramatic improvements over the next few months making Qwicket much more robust and to make it easier to base projects off of and track the changes as Qwicket evolves. I’d also like to add maven support and move to ant task and maven archetype based generation as that’s a little lighter weight for something that (at least for the moment) you use to generate your project and then move on from.
Hopefully Qwicket will help you explore Wicket and get your projects running more quickly. If you have any requests, please feel free to file an RFE in the tracker.
Qwicket now supports basic bean definitions in the UI. The CRUD pages still aren’t there, but the requisite services and DAOs are as well as the spring configurations. The spring setup and project layout have changed a fair bit in this release. What was being done with ant filters has been changed to use spring property replacement. Customization of these property values are now stored in src/conf/application-override.properties with the defaults in src/conf/application.properties.
This release introduces Users into Qwicket itself. You can now save your project and return to it at a later date. You can still work anonymously, though, if you prefer. This release should be pretty solid but it was little rushed to finish before I present at the Denver JUG on the 9th so if you see something, please fill out a bug report using the link in the menu on the left.
I have also updated the documentation to address the missing maven dependencies. There are also two different scripts available to help you update your maven repository. Please try those out and if there’s something missing let me know.
This release is the migration to the web app. You can now create your application online without downloading anything. Other than your generated application code, of course. I also switched to velocity for templating for finer grained control. Click the “Build your project” link to the left, fill in a couple of fields and press enter. The zip file will contain your runnable application skeleton. I’ll put a road map up soon, but the next big feature will be a bean builder that also generates basic CRUD pages for all your beans. Watch this space for details. 
Start your wicket app today here.
I pushed up 0.1 this weekend. I failed to get a run script in the bundle, but it can be run using ant. The default target is to run the builder. This is the first and last release as a swing client. Igor Vaynberg convinced me to write it as a web app. I started down the swing path because I don’t get to write much swing these days and wanted an excuse. The web app route makes a lot of sense though. When that’s done you can create the skeleton of your application and download a zip of the generated code. Nothing to download besides your app. I hope to have the web version up this week with many new features to follow.
I love wicket but like most frameworks, starting a new project can be a real hassle. You’re either left to recode everything from scratch or, if you can, copying over an existing project and removing the vestiges of the old project and updating to the new one. This sort of works but tends to be tedious and error prone. So, taking a page from appfuse, I decided to create a quickstart application for wicket. Qwicket is a swing-based generator that will create the basic skeleton of a wicket+spring+hibernate application so you can get straight to application development. The code generated is based on what I’ve learned from the last few projects I’ve done in wicket. The generated code will continue to evolve as I receive feed back and fine tune the generation based on experience.
The decision to use a swing based generator is very intentional. I could’ve gone the ant route like appfuse did but if you’ve looked at the gymnastics that ant requires in appfuse, you’ll begin to understand why I chose to go this route. Right now, there aren’t really many options to set. Eventually what I plan on having is choices for using ibatis rather than hibernate, for example. I’d also like to have a basic bean builder and CRUD pages generator. Once features like this come on line, the Swing GUI makes more sense. Also, I’d really like to have this run via webstart eventually so you don’t need to check out a svn repository to run it.
As wicket and qwicket continue to evolve, hopefully it will be very easy to track those changes. I’ve also debated adding support for qwicket to be able to edit an existing qwicket-based project but I’m afraid that’s going down a road I’d rather not travel. For now, I hope this project can help beginners and experienced wicket users alike in the wicket development.
