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.
- 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.
