Learning How To Wicket Good

This week we are preparing to launch the DueDates program on a worldwide basis over the internet. For that to happen, all the programmers in the class will learn how to use Wicket, which combines java programming with an html web interface. We will discover how to integrate wicket with our professor’s stack program.


Problems everyone has them
Implementing wicket was a big deal for me, never doing any actual web programming in my past experiences. Programming the wicket part of the stack would have been very difficult if we never have been supplied with any examples from our professor. The examples helped a lot in setting up stack with wicket, like on what to create and what steps to take. Everything was going smoothly for me; all the parts on the java side were working fine, until I had to implement a web table that can store the elements of the stack.


This was a problem I had, creating a somewhat dynamic table for the stack elements. I went over and over on the contents from the Wicket in Action book; I found something’s that could have worked, but didn’t really make sense to me. So I looked over the internet for tips, and didn’t find anything. So I just settled for the bare minimum and displayed the stack on a single row of the table.


Also another problem I had was for errors, such as trying to remove an element from the stack when it is already empty. I couldn’t really approach this problem, since I committed most of my time trying to solve the table of elements problem. I had an idea of creating a label and having it display when ever the error occurred, but there just wasn’t enough time to implement that idea into the program.


The Experience
I was not able to finish the full requirements set by our professor. There is no one or thing to blame really; I just had poor time management during this assignment. Although I got a lot of the assignment, wicket is a very good tool for implementing a web interface for java programs. It was easy to pick up and see all the patterns of how it works, such as establishing ids for things that will appear in the html file from the java file. I learned also another on going lesson from this, “Have Better Time Management”.


My Stack Wicket DownLoad