(WWB) is a Wicket component toolkit for displaying and editing JavaBeans. Web pages are automatically generated based on bean properties and conventions. If necessary, the layout, editability, and actions of these pages can be customized. At the highest-level, WWB's BeanForm component provides rich AJAX form functionality. The form is embedded in a Page designed by you. This allows you to create customized page designs and multiple BeanForms to be incorporated on a single page.Other lower-level components may be used independently of BeanForm (e.g., BeanGridPanel). BeanForm makes it very convenient to implement a bean-based form if you don't want to go to a lot of extra work. You focus on the model (beans), Fields within a form are dynamically sent back to the server-side bean as they are changed, which eliminates the typical form submit cycle. This makes WWB act more like a rich client application and less like a standard forms-based application.
I have been using Wicket for a while now and I’ve occasionally wondered if GWT provides any kind of advantage over Wicket. Here is a comparison and instead of coding a simple “Hello World” kind of example, here is something a little more complex. Functionality The target functionality is a one-page application that shows data in a single table. Item counts are displayed categorized under multiple “spaces” (workspaces). There is a summary row. The user can click on a space to expand the count of items grouped by status. Some of the tricky parts are: * The number and names of the possible status types can be different for different spaces. * Some of the table cells have to be merged to represent the grouping by space and then by status. * the style / color of the different cells has to be controlled to differentiate the total count from that grouped by status. Let's look at the Java code common to the GWT and Wicket implementations.
I want to start using JPA with Wicket, and the quickest way was to start with Qwicket, a project that already has done the heavy lifting. I wanted to be able to build and run my maven-managed application from eclipse. And lastly, I wanted to use MySQL. Qwicket does come with maven support, but it's managed from an ant script. I wanted native maven support. Here's what I did to change qwicket so it fits my requirements:
Wicket is a lightweight, component-oriented framework that does much to bring the easy, intuitive interfaces found in desktop applications to Java Web development. In this series Nathan Hamblen (of databinder and coderspiel blog ) introduces key aspects of Wicket that differentiate it from other Web application frameworks This first ( of 3 ) article investigates Wicket's virtual state, demonstrating the many ways Wicket accommodates both stateless and stateful Web application development.