Java EE6 & Wicket

Back To The Future

It's been a while since I've written about Java EE & Wicket. My last articles on the subject covered Java EE5 and EJB dependency injection (DI) in Wicket objects. Since I wrote those articles Java EE6 has been released along with compliant EE6 servers like GlassFish, Wicket has seen a number of point updates and the popular NetBeans IDE has upgraded its tooling.

The most interesting new feature that EE6 provides, at least from my perspective, is EAR-less deployments. With EE5 you often needed to resort to having to implement an EAR module and tie all the sub projects into that. Java EE6 eliminates that requirement - though EARs are still supported – which greatly simplifies creating Java EE6 applications and NetBeans supports creating EAR-less projects.

It would be impossible to cover all the new features that EE6 provides so I’ve decided to write a few articles covering my favorite Java related topics – EE and Wicket. In my opinion NetBeans has much better tooling and plugin support for dynamic Web projects that use Wicket so I will also discuss its tooling support for EE6 and Wicket.

I will use a simple Guest Book application as the context for the articles and I will try to keep each article small but well focused so as not to overwhelm you with too much information all at once. As I see it now the topics for each article will be something along the lines of the following:

1. An introduction presenting the requirements for the GuestBook Web application as well as discuss its architecture. I will also identify those pieces of the architecture that you will need to download and install on your development box.
2. Creating a backing datastore and schema using MySQL – here I’ll discuss creating the database that will be used as the backing data store for the Guest Book Web application.
3. Generating the Guest Book Web application using NetBeans and deploying it to GlassFish. We will also add all the required jar files to the project.
4. Adding JPA Persistence support to the project.
5. Building out the Guest Book Web application using NetBeans and testing it.
6. A wrap up.

This is what the finished Guest Book Application will look like:

Stay tuned! I’ll be rolling these articles out over the next few weeks so please check back frequently.

Updated 3/31/2011

Here’s a list of urls for the 6 articles in this series:

1. http://jeff-schwartz.blogspot.com/2011/03/java-ee6-wicket-article-1-requirements.html
2. http://jeff-schwartz.blogspot.com/2011/03/java-ee6-wicket-article-2-creating.html
3. http://jeff-schwartz.blogspot.com/2011/03/java-ee6-wicket-article-3-generating.html
4. http://jeff-schwartz.blogspot.com/2011/03/java-ee6-wicket-article-4-adding-jpa.html
5. http://jeff-schwartz.blogspot.com/2011/03/java-ee6-wicket-article-5building-out.html
6. http://jeff-schwartz.blogspot.com/2011/03/java-ee6-wicket-article-6-wrap-up.html