Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Wicket and Sitemesh: installed and working
Today I decided to divert my attention for a little while from JPA and focus on installing Tomcat, the Tomcat Eclipse plugin and then Wicket and Sitemesh. I decided to use Tomcat for development mainly because of the Tomcat plugin support. Normally I hate Tomcat because of the standard Apache Open Sores way of handling errors: e.printStackTrace(). If I had a nickel for every time Tomcat shat out 300 lines of stack trace because one line was malformed in a JSP, I'd have a lot of nickels. Fortunately, it looks like a lot of the performance problems I'm accustomed to feeling with Tomcat are greatly mitigated in version 5.5.20. It no longer takes the better part of a day to start up, for example... now it's down to about 5 seconds, which I can tolerate. The first page load is still a little sluggish, but nowhere near as bad as it used to be.
My next task was to get Wicket going. For some reason the 'binary' distribution of Wicket 1.2.2 contains all of the source to it, including all of its tests. I don't really need all of that crap. Fortunately, in the root of the zip file is wicket-1.2.2.jar. I wish I had noticed that before I unpacked the entire thing.
It was, quite literally, more difficult to set up the directory structure for my web apps than it was to get Wicket to display my first wicket application. I'm really impressed with how well it works out of the box and how few dependencies it has (basically none). Granted, my first attempt was your typical "Hello, World" application, but I'm really impressed at how easy it was and how I didn't have to wade through 60 exceptions generated by my not knowing what I'm doing. It's really easy to do something simple, just as it should be!
Next it was Sitemesh's turn. I elected to grab the Sitemesh example war file for version 2.2.1. Since I was just experimenting, I dumped the whole thing, except the web.xml file, into my web app root. (I think I forgot to turn on auto-deployment so I just unzipped the whole thing myself.) Then I copied the bits of web.xml that I needed, reordered web.xml (though why Sun decided that the order of web.xml should be significant I'll never understand), restarted Tomcat and ... it just worked! My "hello" now appeared inside the Sitemesh example page.
My only complaint about Sitemesh is its relative lack of thorough documentation. Yes, the basic features all have their basic documentation, but what would really be helpful is a Sitemesh Cookbook, showing common layout problems and their solutions. Maybe if I knew what I was doing, this would be a good project to undertake.
My next task was to get Wicket going. For some reason the 'binary' distribution of Wicket 1.2.2 contains all of the source to it, including all of its tests. I don't really need all of that crap. Fortunately, in the root of the zip file is wicket-1.2.2.jar. I wish I had noticed that before I unpacked the entire thing.
It was, quite literally, more difficult to set up the directory structure for my web apps than it was to get Wicket to display my first wicket application. I'm really impressed with how well it works out of the box and how few dependencies it has (basically none). Granted, my first attempt was your typical "Hello, World" application, but I'm really impressed at how easy it was and how I didn't have to wade through 60 exceptions generated by my not knowing what I'm doing. It's really easy to do something simple, just as it should be!
Next it was Sitemesh's turn. I elected to grab the Sitemesh example war file for version 2.2.1. Since I was just experimenting, I dumped the whole thing, except the web.xml file, into my web app root. (I think I forgot to turn on auto-deployment so I just unzipped the whole thing myself.) Then I copied the bits of web.xml that I needed, reordered web.xml (though why Sun decided that the order of web.xml should be significant I'll never understand), restarted Tomcat and ... it just worked! My "hello" now appeared inside the Sitemesh example page.
My only complaint about Sitemesh is its relative lack of thorough documentation. Yes, the basic features all have their basic documentation, but what would really be helpful is a Sitemesh Cookbook, showing common layout problems and their solutions. Maybe if I knew what I was doing, this would be a good project to undertake.
Labels: software
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