Wicket 1.2 released

The [Wicket development team][wicket] has released the next major release of Wicket.
They have put a lot of effort into making it even more easy for us to develop
professional webapplications. Some of the new features which I think is particulary
useful is the new [AJAX][ajax] support and the WicketTester. (Read the full
[release note][release])

The WicketTester is a great way to test your components without having to use a
container for it. At [Avaleo][avaleo], we have used this the last couple of month since
some of the first beta releases of 1.2 and it really speeds up writing unit tests
for all the components, pages etc that we create.

The last month I have played around with the [AJAX][ajax] implementation and I most say that
it really is nice that you don’t have to do any Javascript yourself to make it work.
At the moment we are strongly considering using [AJAX][ajax] in our application so it’s
great that Wicket provides such a clean and simple API for it.

Just to mention some of the other new features which I believe makes a difference (at least
for me at the moment):

Taken from the [release note][release]:

* Nice URL support through URL mounting
* Spring support for injecting your business logic into your web pages in a non-intrusive manner, while still being able to use the convenient Wicket idiom for creating pages (using the Java new operator).
* Improved performance by replacing OGNL with our own object graph language parser

[wicket]: http://www.wicketframework.org
[ajax]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29
[avaleo]: http://www.avaleo.net/
[release]: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=10467093&forum_id=46143

New Job

Today I start at my new job at [Avaleo][1].

The reason I change is not that I’m in any way unhappy with my former employer.
[Casalogic][2] is a really cool company, which specialises in Open Source
consultancy. Thank you Casalogic for all the fun we’ve had and all the knowledge
that I’ve gained.

What about [FriFinans][3]? One of my main responsibilities at [Casalogic][2]
were the development and some project management of there Open Source project,
[FriFinans][3]. Now that I’m not working there anymore things are of cause going
to change. I will not be managing the project anymore, but that doesn’t keep me
from committing patches, functionality from time to time.

My main task at [Avaleo][1] is to be a part of a team which develops a
healthcare system. For information about this, look at [Avaleo's website][1].
We only use Open Source Java software like: [Spring][4], [Wicket][5],
[Hibernate][6], [Eclipse][7] etc.

[1]: http://www.avaleo.net/
[2]: http://www.casalogic.com/
[3]: http://www.frifinans.org/
[4]: http://www.springframework.org/
[5]: http://www.wicketframework.org/
[6]: http://www.hibernate.org/
[7]: http://www.eclipse.org/