Wicket Katas

Overview
For this assignment we were given eleven different coding katas, for Wicket. A coding kata is a programming exercise, which through practice and repetition, will help you hone your skills. We were given eleven katas as Wicket programming exercises in hopes of helping us get a little more familiar with Wicket. Some of them were really easy while others were a bit more challenging, but doing these katas definitely helped me get more familiar with Wicket. I would definitely say that katas, in general, are good for helping someone get used to a new language, framework, or anything that they're new to. Repeating and practicing small exercises, at least from my experience, will help you get used to the new environment you're working in. I would say if you started with a few simple katas and then moved on to increasingly harder ones, you would probably have a firm understanding of whatever it was you were trying to learn. In the following section I will visit the eleven Wicket katas that we did in detail.

The Eleven Wicket Katas

• Exercise 01
  Kata 1A - Add a new line to the page that says, "In one week, the time will be ", where is replaced by a timestamp one week later than the timestamp that now appears on the page.
  • Finished: Yes
  • Time to complete: 10 minutes
  • Problems Encountered: The only problem I ran into for this kata was whether to use Date or Calendar for displaying the date. I couldn't figure out how to add time using Date, so I ended up using Calendar because it has an add method built in.
  Kata 1B - Add a button to the page labelled "Refresh". After pushing the button, the times update themselves.
  • Finished: Yes
  • Time to complete: 15 minutes
  • Problems Encountered: I had a problem with the buttons onSubmit method. I didn't realize that you have to override the onSubmit method.
  Kata 1C - Wicket, by default, runs in "Development" mode, but production systems should run in "Deployment" mode. Override the getConfigurationType() method so that Example01 now runs in Deployment mode.
  • Finished: Yes
  • Time to complete: 5 minutes
  • Problems Encountered: This kata was particularly easy; it just took a quick search to figure out how to change this setting.
• Exercise 02
  Kata 2A - Add an additional link on the home page that says, "Go to image page". Create this page, which should display an embedded image. This image should be G-rated. It should be in a .jpg file stored with the system, not retrieved from the web.
  • Finished: Yes
  • Time to complete: 1 hour
  • Problems Encountered: I got the image and link working properly within 5 minutes, but it took me an hour to figure out why the image wasn't rendering properly. After some help from other students I was able to fix the issue and get the image to render properly.
  Kata 2B - Add a button on the home page with the label, "Make font bold". After the user pushes it, all the text on the page should become bold, and the button label should change to "Make font italic". When the user pushes that button, all of the text should change to italic and the button label should change to "Make font normal". Pushing that button changes the text back to its original state and the button label should now say "Make font bold".
  • Finished: Yes
  • Time to complete: 25 minutes
  • Problems Encountered: Most of the time I spent on this kata was spent thinking of how I was going to program it. When I started programming it was pretty straight-forward and everything seemed to work smoothly.
• Exercise 03
  Kata 3A - Add a new tab called "Image" that takes the user to a page containing an embedded image (your choice, G-rated). It should be in a .jpg file stored with the system, not retrieved from the web.
  • Finished: Yes
  • Time to complete: 5 minutes
  • Problems Encountered: This kata was essentially the same as kata 2A so it was very easy to complete.
• Exercise 04
  Kata 4A - Add a new cheese called "Velveeta", which costs $0.25/lb.
  • Finished: Yes
  • Time to complete: 5 minutes
  • Problems Encountered: None, this was just a matter of adding a new item to the list of cheeses.
  Kata 4B - Add a "country" field to the billing address that appears when checking out. The country field should provide a drop-down menu with a selection of 5 countries.
  • Finished: Yes
  • Time to complete: 30 minutes
  • Problems Encountered: I didn't realize that I needed to modify the Address object at first, so I was only modifying the CheckoutPage java and html file. This caused errors to occur and it took me a while to figure out that I needed to modify the Address object and add in the country.
• Exercise 06
  Kata 6A - Get rid of the blue columns that appear when displaying the website. These are for development, not deployment purposes.
  • Finished: Yes
  • Time to complete: 2 minutes
  • Problems Encountered: No issues came up, I just had to change the style from "container showgrid" to "container".
  Kata 6B - Place the image underneath the form, not to the right.
  • Finished: Yes
  • Time to complete: 2 minutes
  • Problems Encountered: No issues, just had to make both the image and form divs used up the same amount of columns.
  Kata 6C - It is often convenient for web applications to consult a properties file when starting up in order to get configuration values. An easy way to do this is with the standard Java Properties mechanism. (See Java in a Nutshell for details on properties file manipulation.) For this Kata, modify your Example06 system to read in a file (if present) located in ~/.example06/configuration.properties.
  • Finished: Yes
  • Time to complete: 40 minutes
  • Problems Encountered: I just had to do some research on how to use Properties in Wicket, besides that everything was pretty straight forward.

Deliverables

• akinsey-wicket-example01
• akinsey-wicket-example02
• akinsey-wicket-example03
• akinsey-wicket-example04
• akinsey-wicket-example06