Wicket Chart (Google-O-meter)

Introduction

In addition to our group solar decathlon design mockups, this week, we also have to create a web page application individually. We are to implement a one page web application that provides two components: a form that accepts a variety of parameters along with a submit button that when pressed, generates a GoogleOMeter visualization.  Click here for an example of GoogleOMeter.

Web Application

The form should allow the user to set the start and end of the Y axis, the title, the width and height of the chart, and  the data value for the pointer. Our web application should use Wicket, Blueprint CSS for layout, the class' build system. We also need provide at least one useful test case and employ sessions so that multiple users can generate charts independently.

Wicket Experience

I was excited about learning Wicket. I just started  creating web pages and web application from my internship and I thought that Wicket will be very helpful in the future. I had to relearn HTML and then learn PHP, CSS and Javascript on my own to be able to do our previous project.  It turned out though that Wicket was harder than I thought. Setting the pages alone took me more than an hour. Since I never seen any Wicket code in action before,  I had to reuse the example Wicket project that were given to us by our professor and then work from there.
I have to say that creating web application/pages using Wicket is a very long and complicated process. The only thing I like about Wicket is we were able to work and enhanced our skill in Java. The only advantage that I can see about using Wicket is a high quality web application due to the fact that we are using build system to create it.
My over all experience in Wicket is not bad, because I get to learn a new framework and also enhance my skill in writing Java.

Wicket Chart Web Application

Below is the finished product for the implementation of the web application for creating Google O Meter chart. Beside from spending most of the time getting use to Wicket, I also spend most of my time making my page attractive by creating images for the header and the footer. I had fun creating this page and there are a lot more room for improvements.

 
Lesson Learned

Creating web application is very hard and  frustrating at first, especially when using a framework for the first time such as Wicket. It is very rewarding though once you see the result and it makes you want to learn some more.

Download

My Wicket chart can be downloaded here.