Hi Jeremy,
I think the most important things a wicket programmer should know relate
to building their own set of resuable components. Here are my top ten
on that theme:
1. Build a reusable set of components tailored for your business domain.
2. Solve a few problems then push up the common functionality into an
AbstractBaseComponent class where the other uses are subclasses.
3. Or externalize the component setup choices through an interface and
keep the class non-abstract. Then the callers setup an implementation
of the interface for each case. The interface would control things like
show/hide on no results or enable/disable certain fields, basically any
choice that is useful to externalize.
4. Understand how extending FormComponentPanel<BusinessObject> can hide
complexity and provide improved form validation options.
e.g. We have a query application and the form builds the Task to be
executed. We have a filter that contains List<VariableFilter>filters
and each Variable Fitler is itself a List<String>optionsList.
Creating a custom Form component at each layer we can be assured that
the complicated elements at each level have been validated properly
before the task is submitted. Since the top level submit need only deal
with the objects being assembled into the task, their internals are
assured to be valid.
5. convertInput needs to setConvertedInput(new BusinessObject()) and
this is what the validators run against. Only when they pass does the
modelObject = convertedInput.
6. Build separate class files for custom Models and Columns (no dynamic
inner classes) since any IDE can easily handle the separation and
because having them separate enables more reuse.
7. Know how repeaters like ListView and DataTable work and internalize
them within your own panels to hide their complexity from the callers of
your panel.
8. Know how to emit javascript to the browser both as one off and in
terms of a custom DOM object for your application. Especially important
is how to write this javascript so that it will scale. i.e. the panel
can be used more than once per page.
9. Understand wicket serialization, typically with the experience of
having your spring container with some big data store write out to disk
on each page change. A versioned page with ajax and this case is the
most fun. And how @SpringBean creates serializable proxies that prevent
this. But also how getting an inner object from the @SpringBean proxy
will leave you open to the same cascading serialization issue.
10. Understand how to layer models to traverse the BusinessObject graph
to access certain fields. Don't use PropertyModels in production
instead layer models to access the fields of interest.
e.g. new BusinessAccountModel (IModel<BusinessAccount>backingModel,
Type.ACCT_NUMBER) to create the get/set pair for the account number from
the backing model. I can image the backing model being a
LoadableDetachableModel<BusinessAccount>() that loads the account data
from the database.
See:
https://cwiki.apache.org/WICKET/working-with-wicket-models.html#WorkingwithWicketmodels-WrappedObjectModels
Regards,
Mike
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