Richard Wilkinson’s Blog

Why are there so many java web frameworks?

I try to keep up with the latest java technologies by subscribing to a number of different rss feeds, one of the underlying trends seems to be ‘hey look at my cool new java web framework’ and I keep asking myself why keep reinventing the wheel?  Clearly I’m a big fan of wicket, but I’m not going to get
into a ‘wicket is the best ever’ rant.

Instead i’m going to say that regardless of your requirements, there surely must already be at least one framework that meets practically all of them.  So given that what you want already exists, why go and build it yourself anyway?  Or can they not use google?

But suppose that you do build your own framework, this means that out of all existing frameworks, none meet your requirements (or you can’t use google).  From this we can deduce that you have quite specialized requirements (or you are less computer literate than a 10 year old), meaning that your requirements probably won’t be shared by many other people, so why oh why do you then take your poorly documented, highly specialized code and thrust it upon the world?

We aren’t interested that you can build an entire app that says hello world with one command, or that you have a slightly different method of hacking together java, html, ajax in a ‘really cool way’.

</rant>

Terracotta and Wicket (the next generation)

Edit: with the 1.1.3 release you should follow the instructions on this post.  It is no longer required for you to set up the page store yourself.

The new terracotta wicket-tim is out!

Any wicket and terracotta users will know that the previous wicket-tim had issues under heavy load, which is why some months ago I set about creating something better, with lots of help from the wicket community, especially Stefan Fussenegger, we created a new in-memory page map which can cope with high load.

To use this you will need to add the wicket-tim to your classpath, if you are using maven then add this to your pom.xml file:

	org.terracotta.modules
	tim-wicket
	1.1.1

And follow the installation instructions.

In your tc-config.xml you will need to include the wicket-tim module, you can find instructions on how to do this here and here.

Then in your wicket application class you need to use the new page map:

public ISessionStore newSessionStore() {
     return new SecondLevelCacheSessionStore(this,
       new TerracottaPageStore(100));
}

The 100 in the page store parameter is the number of pages (or versions of pages) of history to keep inthe page map, and can be set to anything you feel is appropriate.

The page map is stored in the httpsession so you will need to make sure that httpsession clustering is working correctly.  If you are using tomcat then terracotta should do this automatically.

Feedback and bug reports are welcome, particularity about the user configurable number of pages history.  If we remove this then it will be possible to use byte-code instrumentation to automatically add in the TerracottaPageStore, meaning that the wicket-tim wont need adding onto your application build path.

Richard

A Great Example Of Clear Wording In An Online Form

I was just trying to buy next months train ticket and came across this brilliant attempt by first capital connect to trick their customers into agreeing to all of the marketing junk that you always get with any sort of signup to online services:

The text reads:

As the saying goes ‘Clear as mud’, surely ‘Check this box to receive junk mail’ is sooo much clearer?