Thursday, November 18, 2010

Wicket Development

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~gburgess/wicket-example06-1.1.1118.zip
Wicket for those who don't know, is a back end hookup between the "stateless HTML and state-driven Java".  Basically, its the missing link (aside from applets) between Java and web pages.  One of the assignments for my Software Development class was to create a page that took in user input and generated a Google Visualization based on the input.  This was actually a pretty neat assignment, as it wasn't too much of a stretch to understand the Wicket code, and the result was a really cool program. The program works by taking in user inputs and using them to generate a URL for Google Visualizations, and then refreshing the image with the new URL.  Google Visualizations uses data passed by the URL to generate charts in real time. 

When I realized what was going on, I had a moment of shock, awe, and inspiration.  This is the kind of thing that makes programmers giggle and squeal for joy (or cackle).  Wicket seems like a pretty neat little framework as it extends my ability to program out onto the web.  While its true that applets can be embedded into web pages, this framework lets Java out of the box, and lets it frolic across the web.

I must admit, I was a bit shocked at the number of files that are necessary to run a single application, but they're all fairly short, and the connections between them are fairly straight forward.  The only real stumper that i came across was the WicketTester class.  It was pretty badly documented, and I wasn't sure what kind of path syntax it looks for, so my test case was pretty lame.  But I'm fairly impressed by the simplicity of Wicket, I was able to pick it up and run though a neat sample with ease.
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~gburgess/wicket-example06-1.1.1118.zip

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