At my current assignment, I needed to get my fellow developers up to speed with Wicket. So I put together a one day course that taught them enough to join in on the work of a current application. Everything is publicly available on GitHub here:  https://github.com/perty/wicket-kurs.

You get a starting plate for a complete web application with database backend accessed through Spring Data JPA. Also, there is a Power Point presentation that guides you through the exercises. Very little is spent on Wicket philosophy and concepts to the benefit of hands on coding.

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Have not all of us been in a spot where we feel an urgent need to fix some quality such as performance or availability, which takes a change in the architecture for effect? And yet we are pushed to work on new features instead?

There is a chasm between the tech side and business side that has to be bridged before a sound dialogue about system architecture can take place.

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Today I decided to update my canned wicket test examples to the latest version of Wicket.

I still think Wicket is a really nice web framework for the following reasons, primarly.

1. Hot deploy from the Maven archetype. The quick start setup offered from the Wicket site gives you “change-and-reload” out of the box.
2. Unit testing framework built in. You test the logic of the web application without resorting to click simulation.
3. HTML separation. Allows you to work in a tight loop with an interaction designer that can use any HTML editor.
4. No need for JavaScript. Well, for the basic stuff at least. The examples here all use AJAX.

Unit testing of the GUI is not the same as unit testing through the GUI. We are interested in the logic of the GUI rather than the placement and order of the GUI widgets on screen.

Testing the logic makes the tests less sensitive to changes in presentation but introduces the problem of JavaScript dependent features. AJAX is in the vogue so we wish to be able to do testing of that too without being forced to start a browser. There is some support for AJAX in Wicket that may be reached using the test framework that is part of Wicket. However, it is not straightforward to use and there are some pitfalls.

Here are three examples of avoiding those, one for each of the check box, drop down and radio group controls.Continue reading

I’ve survived my first Rocket Day. RD are our seminars at Crisp where we talk for half a day on a subject of choice. Mine was Test Driven Development with Wicket and Mockito.

I chosed to do a live coding performance as I liked to do a very down-to-earth, practical seminar.

The slides are currently in swedish but I will translat them to english. Later. 😉

However, most of you read swedish so I have published them here.

För er som inte knarkar tekniknyheter lika okontrollerat som jag gör har jag nöjet att få summera de senaste 5-6 veckorna inom områdena Java, Ajax, Scrum och annat av intresse. Tro mig, jag har gallrat stenhårt. JUnit 4.4 släpptes nyligen. Nyheterna var inte speciellt upphetsande. En av mina favoritbloggare, Cederic Beust, har skrivit om dynamiska

Genom åren har jag skrivit webb applikationer med Servlets, JSP och nu senast Tapestry, som jag länge sett som det bästa av dem alla, mest för att det är komponentbaserat och för att template filerna är plain vanilla HTML. Min senaste brottningsmatch med Tapestry var tyvärr inte helt angenäm. Ofta var det enkelt att använda,