Thanks Igor for your patience :)Yes this solution is neat. So in this case we are by passing the PageMap concept built into wicket since we are creating the WelcomePage ourselves?
no, we are not bypassing the pagemap. wicket will put any page we create into the pagemap for us if it needs to be there ( ie it got rendered or it was redirected to). pagemap is really wicket's internal store for page instances that might still need to be around.
So its ok to instantiate pages if the situation demands it ?. But it also means that if my WelcomePage has lots of widgets, the component tree for WelcomePage will be constructed again.
wicket is an unmanaged framework, so you should treat pages/components like regular classes - ie when you need a new page/component you instantiate it. and yes that will cause your component tree to be rebuilt. in my experience this is not a performance hit even for very large pages - because remember this is done only ones for the lifetime of the page which can be very long.
On a side note, I'm not too impressed with the wicket documentation on the wiki but user-support is excellent!
most of our documentation is in the javadoc. we try to keep that as much as possible up to date and comprehensive. i realize that javadoc does not provide any tutorial-like docs, but it is most of what we have right now.
the wiki has a new-user guide, but i dont know how up to date that is. what i would recomend is wiki's page on models - that is a must.
when i was learning wicket i learned mostly by looking at the examples and building on them. but i came from tapestry, so most of wicket's concepts looked familiar to me.
there is also a Wicket in Action book being written by two of the developers, so that should help in the future as well.
I shall try to contribute a tutorial for a beginner like me if that is ok.
that would be great!
-Igor
