Register before April 15 and get a 25% discount!
Also, if you register more than one person, you even get more discount.

Introduction to Solr is a 3 day instructor-led hands-on in-classroom training course, written by the engineers who helped write the Lucene/Solr code and led by JTeam’s certified trainers. The objective of this course is to provide you with real use cases and teach you how to apply Solr search engine technologies to business requirements. During the course you will learn to apply best practices developing scalable, high availability and high performance search applications. View the course description.

This course is taught in collaboration with Lucid Imagination, the first commercial entity offering official training and support on Apache Solr and Lucene. Upon successful completion of the course, participants receive certification from Lucid.

Stay tuned for upcoming Lucene training dates.

Signup now for Solr training on 30th Nov. -2 Dec., or contact JTeam for more  information.

More information about the training can be found here.

The first training is scheduled for September 28-29
(Early Bird discount until August 10).
To register visit: https://www.regonline.co.uk/63382_752732J

The next training is scheduled for November 30 and December 1
(Early Bird discount until October 12).
To register visit: https://www.regonline.co.uk/63382_752742J

Both of these trainings will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The exact location will be disclosed prior to the start of the training.

More information about the training including an outline can be found at the jWeekend site: http://jweekend.com/dev/JW703/
JTeam is a jWeekend “Expert Partner” delivering jWeekend trainings in Nederland / The Netherlands / Holland.

Hope to see you at our next Wicket trainings!

Let me start off by providing some background on the web frameworks we currently use within JTeam. In general we roughly distinguish three categories of web applications with their own distinct requirements:

1. Rich Internet Application (RIA) (a.k.a. ‘Filthy Rich Client’, a.k.a. ‘Fat Client’)
   This category of applications make up applications which tend to depend heavily on rich user interaction to accomplish certain day-to-day tasks. They are typically build as a fat client, containing part of the application logic and only communicating with a server backend when really needed.
2. General-purpose, public website
   As opposed to the previous category, this category makes up interfaces that people do not use to perform day-to-day tasks (although some spend a large part of their workday on Facebook and the likes). These applications usually require SEO friendliness, fast loading, and etcetera. However, they also usually require some enhanced interactivity (read: Ajax, Web 2.0) but only when indexability and accessibility are not compromised.
3. Miscellaneous website
   The last category holds those applications that do not belong to the previous two. Usually these are the more low-level like applications like a search engine frontend designed to just publish content retrieved from a search backend and / or content repository. But this might also be a REST-like API for a partner program or mobile application.

For each of the above categories, JTeam has its preferred technology to build these applications. For instance, we prefer GWT and Flex for the first category and usually fall back on Spring MVC (especially since the addition of @Controller and REST support) for the third one. But for the second category, we tend to use Wicket as our preferred web framework. The remainder of this blog post tries to explain why.

Why Wicket?

As with any development framework, what we are looking for in a web framework are things like a good abstraction over lower level constructs (e.g. request and response), state management (when needed), convention over configuration and support for things like Ajax. This is why component-based web frameworks have become so popular. In short, component-based web frameworks bring Object Orientation (OO) to web development, allowing developers to write reusable components and use these to assemble a page that is rendered to the user. Frameworks like Tapestry, the different Java Server Faces (JSF) implementations (e.g. JBoss Seam) and of course Wicket are component-based.

But Wicket has some clear benefits over the other component-based frameworks:

• Clear separation between logic and view
  In Wicket the view is in standard (X)HTML and the logic is defined in Java. This makes it really easy for web designers to focus on the design while the programmers focus on the Java code. So no mixing of the two using JSP or something similar.
• No configuration in XML
  All of the Wicket specific configuration can be done in your Java code. Although this is not an important benefit for everyone, it is for some.
• Promotes reuse
  Although all component-based frameworks promote reuse to some extend, Wicket does that even more partly because of the previous two points. Having a clear separation between logic and view and having configuration in your Java code allows you to easily reuse those components and configuration.

Already using Wicket?

Are you already using Wicket on one of your projects or are you considering to use it? Let us know so we can share experiences and best practices or maybe you have some issues we can help you with. And keep in mind that we have scheduled a public Wicket training (June 8 and 9) in Amsterdam, which might be interesting for you or any of your team members. More information about this and other upcoming Wicket trainings can be found on our website: http://www.jteam.nl/specials.html

At JTeam we have focussed recently on ‘empowering’ our clients, teaching them on the job about our preferred process and technologies. In that role, we advise the client on trainings for their staff when needed. For trainings about Spring and Hippo we usually introduce the client to our corresponding partner and for some topics (e.g. Hibernate and GWT) we have some of our own training material that we mostly use to teach on the job when needed.

Obviously training is not our core business as we are a software project company. But we still want to be able to offer high quality trainings as an added service to our customers. Therefore we have been talking to jWeekend about a partnership. Starting April JTeam will offer their Wicket training to Dutch customers. The training will be given by Erik van Oosten who has a good reputation in the Wicket community. For now we will focus on on-site trainings on demand, but we might collaborate with jWeekend on organizing public trainings in the Netherlands. So, if you are looking for a Wicket training in Holland, contact us at info@jteam.nl

For more information visit our website.