Happy new year! My team is in the preliminary stages of designing a large social wicket web application and I'm trying to identify a good set of existing tools and technologies that can be leveraged to simplify the development of this application. I would love to hear the opinions and suggestions of other Wicket users. Note that I want to use open source tools as much as possible.
Here are some of the tools that I feel might help. I realize this is a big list and may be off-topic, but am still interested in which technologies other Wicket developers have found work well with a Wicket app. I would appreciate any comments or opinions of these technologies as well as suggestions and alternatives that you feel would be worth my consideration. Wicket I assume no one here will object to this. I plan to use version 1.4. MySQL First choice for database. I've used it MySQL more than any other database and it hasn't let me down. PostgreSQL Second choice for database. I've used it less than MySQL, so additional time might be required to install, configure, and use it. Spring + Hibernate I'm comfortable with these technologies as I've been using them for a few years with Wicket. But I'm certainly open to suggestions, opinions, etc. Hibernate Annotations Ive been using HBM files, but I'm thinking I should look into getting rid of my mapping files and put the mapping right into the pojos. Is this the right call? Salve Never used it, but it appears many Wicket developers do. Is it worth looking into? WicketWebBeans Might use this for rapid back-end UI development. Besides rolling my own, are there other tools like this? Brix Jackrabbit Our application will need some heavy duty CMS features, and this project looks powerful enough to do the job. Jackrabbit is used by Brix to store content. Lucene Hibernate Search I will need site-wide and data-wide search that encompasses all of the content on the site as well as the data in the application. I'm not sure if these are the best tools for this job, as the content will be stored in Jackrabbit. So I need to be able to search jackrabbit and my data and produce unified search results. Ideas? ACEGI Spring Security I haven't used either of these before so I'm not sure if they will solve my problem: This application will have many levels of roles and permissions. Users will belong to groups and can be assigned roles for a group that allow them to perform actions. For instance, a standard user that belongs to a group can only view some data. But if a user has additional roles assigned to them, then they will gain the ability to see other data, edit data, and so forth. A user can belong to multiple groups, and may have different roles for each group. Shopping Cart Any good open source wicket shopping carts? I have a homemade one that I did for a customer that I plan to start with. But if something else exists, I'd love to hear about it. Amazon FPS This system provides a simple API that can be used to help one user pay another user for service, but allow the infrastructure provider (me) to take a cut out of the transaction. It also supports micro-payments which I could use. The service fits the needs of my business model really well. I've never used it, so does anyone have any horror stories, good things to say, alternative suggestions? Google Checkout PayPal Merchant account The system will also allow for the sale of products. I want to give users a choice of method for accepting payments. They can receive payments via Google Checkout, PayPal, or their own merchant account. If anyone knows of any tools that would help with this, please let me know. Otherwise, I'll just use the APIs directly available from the payment systems. I've already got Google Checkout integrated into another project. OpenID I want to be able to allow users to log in with an OpenID. I understand Spring Security now has this built in. But there are other ways to do it besides Spring. Has anyone integrated OpenID before, and if so what tools did you use? Facebook Developer Program Facebook Connect I haven't really looked into these programs yet, but I'm looking for ways to support Facebook users. It looks like I can get parts of our application to run within facebook. But I'm also wanting to allow facebook users to log into my application and access data and information from FB. For instance, my hope is that making connections with other users in my application can be simplified by utilizing the connections the user has on FB. OpenSocial This tool will help to create a social application platform that other developers can build on top of, create widgets for, and so forth. Also, this will allow my team to integrate our application into other opensocial platforms. OAuth To simplify authentication so I can allow access to my data from other services. Terracotta Never used it, but it looks good for clustering. I need to figure out how to build this application in a way that I can run instances not only locally, but all across the world if necessary. Thoughts? Scalability/Availability/Cloud Computing Amazon EC2 Elastic Cloud Amazon S3 storage Amazon CloudFront Joyent Accelerator We will be hosting the application ourselves initially (perhaps in xen, vbox, or openvz containers). But we want to build it in a way that as it grows, we can easily launch new instances in the cloud. And so we can easily expand our disk storage needs as we grow. And if we get a lot of foreign users, we want to launch instances closer to them, etc. However, I don't like having my application married to Amazon and their APIs... There are so many questions to answer here, and it is way off topic for Wicket. But if anyone has thoughts, please let me know. jQuery I've used this a lot and am familiar with it. ExtJS Some of its components may be useful for my application. Thanks in advance! 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