This starts a series of articles about Wicket. Let’s start using this excellent framework.
Download
Go to wicket.apache.org → Releases → Wicket 1.4 → Select an appropriate mirror and get apache-wicket-1.4-m3.zip
Go to slf4j.org → Download → slf4j-1.5.2.zip
Collect the jars
Add the following jars to the classpath:
- apache-wicket-1.4-m3\lib\wicket-1.4-m3.jar
- slf4j-1.5.2\slf4j-simple-1.5.2.jar
- slf4j-1.5.2\slf4j-api-1.5.2.jar
Configure web.xml
Just add the following to web.xml.
<filter> <filter-name>WicketApplication</filter-name> <filter-class>org.apache.wicket.protocol.http.WicketFilter</filter-class> <init-param> <param-name>applicationClassName</param-name> <param-value>wicket.Home</param-value> </init-param> </filter> <filter-mapping> <filter-name>WicketApplication</filter-name> <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping>
You should only focus on wicket.Home: the class you’ll write in the next step. Of course the package and name of the class is up to you.
Define the starting point
The web application is a class of type WebApplication.
public class Home extends WebApplication {
}
This class must implement a method that specifies the home page.
public class Home extends WebApplication {
public Class getHomePage() {
return Hello.class;
}
}
Hello is the welcome page. It’s what appears on the browser if you call the application context, e.g. http://localhost:8080/wicket.
Start building your pages
Every page has an html file Hello.html and a java file Hello.java of type WebPage.
For example this is Hello.html,
<html> <body> <h1>Hello from Wicket!</h1> </body> </html>
and this is Hello.java.
public class Hello extends WebPage {
}
That’s a minimal page. For normal pages, all the action happens in the no-arg constructor.
Deployment
The only requirement is that the html file is stored in the same directory with its associated class file. That’s all!
Advantages of Wicket
HTML files need no scriptlets, no JSTL, no custom tags, not even a single java statement. This makes development and maintenance enjoyable.
- Real separation of Java and HTML code.
- No additional XML configuration.
- Everything is done in Java.
Review
- Every web application IS-A WebApplication.
- Every page IS-A WebPage.
- Every html file has an associated java file.
The maven archetype is even easier to get started with if you use Maven. Just click “quick start” from the Apache Wicket home page. You’ll be running Wicket in about 2 minutes.
Hi Mr. Locke, thank you for stopping by. Congratulations for creating Wicket!
[…] Niko’s java blog quick & easy Java tutorials « Wicket 1: Setup Wicket […]
[…] It’s trivial to create your pages without even a plugin. For setup information you may recall part 1. […]
[…] For setup information please recall part 1. […]
I love Wicket 🙂