In the latest installment of my Wicket article series I built out the "Post Article" page in my GeekNews example. The GeekNews example is a simple content management system that displays a list of articles on the home page, allows a user to click on an article summary to review the article, and now allows users to post their own articles. I have not covered access control yet to allow only administrators to post articles, but thus far this series includes:

• Links and Bookmarkable links
• Using a ListView repeater to display the list of articles
• Handling form input and binding an object to the form using a CompoundPropertyModel
• Using TextFields and TextAreas in forms
• Simple form field validation: making a field required, validating String length, and validating that a date is in a specified range

GeekNews Part 1 posted on Friday and Part 2 will probably post on Wednesday (we have an abbreviated schedule for the holiday.) Next week I'll review more form types and more form validators and then I'll turn my attention to Spring and Hibernate integration.

My impression of Wicket so far is very positive. Writing web application has not been so much fun in years - I think I'm just happy to be able to focus on writing pure HTML and handling the presentation logic inside a Java class. Many people may disagree with me, but I am finding that it makes developing web applications much easier by avoiding the painful translation of an HTML document to a JSP-marked up HTML document.

The question that is burning in my mind, though, is how much "magic" is Wicket holding on to behind the scenes? Even adopting detachable models (so that model objects are not stored in the HTTP session), I wonder how much memory it is consuming to retain page history? Will Wicket scale well enough to support massive amounts of load? How will it behave with Terracotta? Tune back in as I find the answers to these questions.