NetBeans QuickStart Guide

This quickstart is a small guide to get you up and running to start using Wicket within minutes. This project is meant to be a starting point for your first project. If you are looking for examples, please look at the example projects.

This document and project assume you have no special plugins or application servers installed on your machine. In the final section of this document some hints are given to speed up your development even further.

Summary

For the more seasoned developers here's a short list of steps to quickstart your Wicket development. All these steps are explained in more detail below.

  • download the quickstart project (follow the link in the navigation menu)
  • unzip in your projects directory
  • rename the directory to the name of your project
  • start NetBeans
  • create new project with existing sources, point to your directory
  • run the Application (right-click on project, choose Run - Application)
  • open browser to http://localhost:8081/quickstart
At the end of this document we suggest some next steps to take.

Setting Up

Prerequisites

We assume you have the following already installed:
  • Java SDK 1.4 (or newer)
  • NetBeans 4.1 (or newer)
It is assumed, but not obligatory, that you have installed NetBeans in the following (Windows) directory:
  • C:\NetBeans
Like stated before, it is not obligatory to use these settings, but if your installation does not match this one, please substitute your setup for these assumptions.

The QuickStart Project

Next you need to download the quickstart distribution project from our sourceforge site. Unzip the distribution to the directory where you normally put your NetBeans projects. Rename the directory that was just created to your required project name. In the following the directory name is renamed to 'foobar'.

Running NetBeans

Configuring NetBeans

Now it is time to start the NetBeans IDE, if you haven't done so already.
  1. In the IDE, click Ctrl-Shift-N. (Or choose File > New Project.) The New Project Wizard appears. Choose Web and then Web Application with Existing Sources:
  2. Click Next and browse to the location where you unzipped the Wicket QuickStart sources. Select the "foobar" folder (to which we renamed the downloaded distribution) for the Location field. Name the project "QuickStart". Click Next and Finish.
From a traditional NetBeans IDE (or probably any other) perspective, the structure of the quickstart project is novel, because the HTML file is located within the source package:

Running the Application

The application has an internal webserver ( Jetty ) which can be used to quickly develop webapplications. All you need to do is to run the application and point your browser to the webserver running from within NetBeans.

Next Steps

This section gives some pointers on where to go now.
  • take a look at the examples
  • find more information in the manual
  • find more information on the wiki

Jetty Configuration

The Jetty configuration file is located in the project directory:
src/main/resources/jetty-config.xml
Jetty is started on port 8081 in order to avoid conflicts with other installed application servers (for instance Tomcat). This way it is easier to test with different application servers. This can be configured in the configuration file. See the Jetty documentation for information on how to configure Jetty. Jetty is started in the main -method of the wicket.quickstart.Start class.

Customizing the Application

The main page definitions can be found in the src/main/java/Index.html HTML file and the src/main/java/wicket.quickstart.Index.java class.

Other Application Servers

Even though this project is aimed at Jetty, it is not prohibited to develop using other application servers. If you have another setup, please leave a note on how you set up your environment on the wiki .