Wicket bridges the mismatch between the web's stateless protocol and Java's OO model. The component-based Wicket framework shields you from the HTTP under a web app so you can concentrate on business problems instead of the plumbing code. In Wicket, you use logic-free HTML templates for layout and standard Java for an application's behavior. The result? Coding a web app with Wicket feels more like regular Java programming.

Wicket in Action is a comprehensive guide for Java developers building Wicket-based web applications. It introduces Wicket's structure and components, and moves quickly into examples of Wicket at work. Written by core committers, this book shows you the "how-to" and the "why" of Wicket. You'll learn to use and customize Wicket components, to interact with Spring and Hibernate, and to implement rich Ajax-driven features.

About this Book

Tapestry is a comprehensive web application framework for the Java programming language. Tapestry is based on components, highly reusable building blocks that can be quickly and easily combined to form pages within your application. By using and reusing components, and creating your own components, you can create richly interactive, robust applications with only a modest effort.

Tapestry?s basic style is to break problems into smaller and smaller units; this complements a team development environment where different developers work on different parts of the application. The framework makes it easy for both Java and HTML-only developers to work together without accidentally undermining each other?s work.

When building a web application with any technology, you will be faced with a constant stream of questions: How do I figure out what the user has requested? Where can I store this bit of information? How can I safely add this new functionality? How can I make my application scale? In too many environments, it?s easy to make the wrong decision when confronted with any of these, and many other, development-time questions. It?s too easy to take a quick-and-dirty detour down the wrong path, which ultimately comes back to bite you when you are least prepared to deal with it.

The central goal of Tapestry is to make the easiest choice the correct choice. Over the course of this book, we?ll show you how to build applications using Tapestry, but we will also show you the hidden traps and tangles that Tapestry helps you to avoid.

about this book

This book is written with the intermediate to advanced Java programmer in mind. We assume that you’re familiar with the basics of Java syntax and comfortable considering design alternatives where there may not be a single choice that is superior in all situations.

Having some experience with developing graphical applications, whether in Java or any other language, will be helpful but isn’t necessary. We define all terms as they’re introduced and attempt to point out the purpose behind each widget as well as discuss the technical details of how to use it. However, this isn’t a book about user interface design, so we won’t attempt to cover the myriad details that go into assembling a compelling user experience out of the widgets we present.

We assume that most readers have some experience with Swing, but such experience isn’t necessary to fully enjoy this book. We attempt to draw comparisons to Swing where we feel that doing so imparts additional understanding for Swing veterans, but these comparisons are secondary to the main discussion of each topic. We have made sure you can understand every topic in this book without having programmed a single line of Swing code.

about the title

By combining introductions, overviews, and how-to examples, the In Action books are designed to help learning and remembering. According to research in cognitive science, the things people remember are things they discover during self-motivated exploration.

Although no one at Manning is a cognitive scientist, we are convinced that for learning to become permanent it must pass through stages of exploration, play, and, interestingly, retelling of what is being learned. People understand and remember new things, which is to say they master them, only after actively exploring them. Humans learn in action. An essential part of an In Action book is that it is exampledriven. It encourages the reader to try things out, to play with new code, and to explore new ideas.

There is another, more mundane, reason for the title of this book: our readers are busy. They use books to do a job or solve a problem. They need books that allow them to jump in and jump out easily and learn just what they want just when they want it. They need books that aid them in action. The books in this series are designed for such readers.

about this book

The .NET Framework is composed of such a large range of topics that it is impossible to cover all of them in a single book of any depth. This section introduces the focus of this book, and provides an overview of the contents and conventions used in the text. The end of this section describes the online forum available for any questions or comments on the book, and explains how the source code used in the book can be downloaded from the Internet.

Introducing .NET

Microsoft has a history of reinventing itself. Originally strictly an operating systems company, it expanded into office applications with the likes of Word and Excel, and later took on the Internet with Internet Explorer. The push behind the creation of .NET was likely driven by the success of the Internet and Java as a general environment for large-scale computing solutions. The first version of the framework defined two rather important ideas. The first was a new language, C#, and the second was a standard framework for Windows-based solutions.

The easiest way to understand C# might be to imagine someone writing down all the annoying aspects of C++ and then designing a language to do away with each annoyance. In C++, for example, dealing with pointers can be painful; a number of coding errors are not caught by the compiler (such as if (x = 5)); manipulating strings can be difficult; and there is no good way to safely “downcast” an object to a derived type. The predecessors of C and C++, the B and BPCL languages, did not define a formal type system, which may well account for the rather free-wheeling nature of integers, pointers, and characters in these languages.

The C# language was redesigned from the ground up with the idea of retaining the flexibility of C and C++ while formalizing the type system and language syntax. Many common runtime errors in C++ are compiler errors in C#. Other distinct features include a built-in string type, lack of global variables, and integration of critical system and application errors into a common exception model. Appendix A of this book provides an overview of the syntax, keywords, and features of the C# language. The “What’s new in 2.0” section later in this introduction summarizes the changes made for the 2.0 release of the .NET Framework.