Antwerkz, Inc.

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.