Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Wicket - IDE Support

Last week I restarted checking out the Wicket framework. I specifically looked for IDE support. I started off by checking out
-  Eclipse support: And I found WicketBench. I set it up and initially hit upon some problems. Wicket Bench is supposed to use jetty as the web container automatically but somehow it does not come with a internal jetty jar when installed. This seemed strange to me but I never the less went ahead and provided a jetty jar (took the latest) of my own. Again ran into problems. I figured out later that WicketBench works with Jetty 5.x version and later versions are not supported. Again something which I felt was not right. After sorting that out, I was able to start with doing some development. I used there unit testing model and was initially impressed with the ability to run pages independently. This is still a good feature. But then again when I wanted to run the entire application in one go, I could not find any simple way of doing it. I did not want to write selenium tests to just do some wicket research, hence don't know whether that can solve the problem. Even if it does, I still feel there is merit in providing a simple way to launch the entire app in one go and somehow I could not find any. That sort of sealed the deal with my wicketbench expedition. I decided that it is not good enough
- Netbeans support: The next obvious IDE to look at was Netbeans (I don't yet intend to pay any money for the IDE). Netbeans seemed to have a decent support for Wicket. It does not provide the capability to test single pages (like WicketBench) but testing out the application using tomcat is pretty simple. It provides you linking between html based wicket ids and java components in the java page. Also there seems to some effort to improve support on html palette for wicket components. These sound promising. I found myself pretty much happy for now.
As of today at least, I feel the support for Wicket is far better in Netbeans than in Eclipse.    

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

XP Explained - Reading through

I just started reading XP explained by Kent Beck. I read through the 'Values' of XP chapter and was really inspired. It made a lot of sense to put such a chapter in a book. It somehow takes things beyond the usual tricks and tips. It sort of gives you a feel of what should drive things. Among the important values mentioned (communication, simplicity, feedback, courage and respect), I felt the last two were pretty important ones. I felt that the most important thing for a team to win (whether they follow XP or not) is mutual respect for each other. While respect out of politeness is a nice thing to have, I feel the real respect would come if each member knows the other as equally competent as her/him.
Another thing which was mentioned in passing in the book, is conceptual integrity. When Kent talks about the team moving towards a common coding style that is what he seems to be hinting at. I have always felt it to be an important thing.
But then, he himself raises the question of creative independence - something which will have to be foregone to achieve conceptual integrity. What should one chose?