Having used Wicket for almost two years now, I was pleased to see that the long-awaited "Wicket In Action" from Manning is close to making it's appearance on bookshelves near you. I was privileged to review the manuscript for this book back then, and it took several weeks off my learning curve for Wicket. It was an excellent book then and is even better now. If a week of your time is worth more than the cover price, there shouldn't be any difficulty in making the decision to buy it.

At well over 350 pages, the book starts with a gentle introduction to web development with Wicket, introducing concepts in relation to well-worn existing paradigms. The pace rapidly builds into the primary discussion of the domain and component models, giving the reader everything they need to know about how to be incredibly productive with it. Along the way, entertaining examples with real-world applications are presented, employing all of the essential foundational elements and display components your Wicket application will want to be a success. Wicket is an innovative evolution of MVC programming with simple roots, but without a primer such as this, it can be more challenging than it needs to be.

Developing an for a component-oriented web framework without sacrificing expressiveness is a challenging task. This is evidenced by the constant changes that are made in many different frameworks, some of which are painfully incompatible with previous releases. There was a time that a major overhaul to the Wicket API was envisioned, and in an effort to meet that challenge, this book was exhaustively overhauled. For very good technical reasons, that branch was considered undesirable, but many valuable lessons were learned from it and over time, those were integrated back into the core of the project.

What I think is interesting about this book, and the Wicket team in general, is that they didn't just rush that existing manuscript to market. Nor did they accept undesirable changes to the framework because so much effort had already been put into the book. Instead, the changes were made to the framework as they should have been, and the manuscript evolved in turn to reflect the current reality. This took more time than anyone probably realized it would, but it was well worth it.

The result is that the framework has reached a level of stability that would be impossible if there was any concern that the premiere documentation source for it would be put further out of date with a change under consideration. And in the process of reaching that level of stability, the reader is thus ensured that their investment in learning through it will be preserved as long as possible.

I'm obviously really pleased that Martijn and Eelco are finally going to press. Wicket is one of the first tools I talk about when I meet other Java programmers with an interest in presentation technologies, and now I have a great tome that I can suggest so they can get started with it quickly and easily.

Congrats, guys!