Wicket Chart Web Application

Overview
For this venture, we were given the task of creating a website with an interactive graph using Wicket and Google Visualization. Wicket is a Java based web application framework which basically allows you to use Java to create advanced web applications, and Google Visualization allows people to create dynamics graphs with all types of data. For this task we combined Wicket and Google Visualization to produce a webpage that allows you to modify the data values, ranges, and title of the graph displayed on the page.

Learning Wicket
As mentioned by the instructor of my Software Engineering class, Wicket has a very steep learning curve. Needless to say it wasn't easy to learn; even reading Wicket in Action, a book on Wicket, didn't fully prepare me for the actual programming aspect. At first glance, the code seemed quite overwhelming but after sitting down and actually studying the code I began to connect the pieces. In my opinion, frameworks like Wicket require hands on experience to actually learn how to use them.

To be completely honest, my general impression of Wicket is that it's excessively complicated to design what should be a really simple webpage. Take the page I designed for this assignment for example: it took me six java files and one html to create. If I were to create this same page in php, a web scripting language, it would take me a single php file and be immensely simpler. One thing I particularly liked about Wicket is the fact that you can use automated debugging tools such as checkstyle, findbugs, and pmd. Finally, like how I could used an automated building system like Ant to manage the entire project, as this greatly speeds up this development and distribution process.

The Web Application
As mentioned above the function of the web application is pretty straight forward: you can modify the form values on the left of the page and the changes will reflect on the chart displayed on the right. Below is a screen shot of the application to give everyone a better idea of what the application looks like:

Lessons Learned
Given the task, I learned that web application development is definitely not as easy as it seems. The process is definitely tedious, but life can be made easier by using tools such as ant, findbugs, checkstyle, and pmd. While doing this assignment, I was really just reassured about how necessary automated quality assurance tools are. I'm glad that I got some experience with Wicket in the process of doing this assignment, and I in the future it might be useful if I have to design a large web application.

Deliverables
My Wicket chart web application can be downloaded here:
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~akinsey/ics413/wicket-chart-akinsey-1.1.1117.zip