Saturday, April 10, 2010

Qwickie: a usefull eclipse plugin for Wicket Development

In this post I will introduce Qwickie, a usefull eclipse plugin for Wicket Development.

In my daily work I develop software applications. As a web framework we use Wicket, a component based framework with a clear separation of the presentation and the logic.

The connection you between presentation and logic is made via "wicket:id"'s. (See the wicket examples page how this is done.) I found myself executing the following behavioural pattern or it's inverse a lot.

  1. Seek a wicket:id in a webpage
  2. Find corresponding wicket:id in the code

Recently I came across a nice little eclipse plugin which speeds up this pattern. It is named Qwickie, and it facilitates the following use cases:

  • Navigate from java code elements to the corresponding html element via wicket:id
  • Show the corresponding html fragment from the java code element

Both actions are performed by clicking the wicket:id while holding down the ctrl button. This shaves off time following the association between presentation and logic.