Implementing a stack in Wicket - a simple example that leads to frustration

Wicket good
Now that we've been working on the DueDates project for the past few weeks, the next step is to design a web interface for it. Unfortunately, many of us don't know the difference between a CSS tag and a kangaroo, so our professor gave us a very simple assignment to help us 'jump start' our way into using Wicket.

What is Wicket?
So what is Wicket? According to Wikipedia, it's a "lightweight component-based web application framework for the Java programming language." In simpler words, it's a tool that allows Java developers to write Java programs to display web pages. This is different from Java applets that run inside a web page; Wicket allows developers to take advantage of Java to generate web pages for them. This means that all the features of Java can be used, such as inheritance and encapsulation, and dynamic websites can be created much like writing a normal Java program.

Stacks of Wicket
Our assignment this time was to implement a stack in a web page using Wicket. Three buttons are available to push, pop, and clear the stack, and a text box was provided to push new strings onto the stack. This program seems deceptively simple, but it proved to be a challenge to do in Wicket, even with the professor's ample examples and bootstrap code for us to use. Coupled with the poorly-written Javadocs for Wicket, I found it hard to make progress while writing the code. In the end I did finish the assignment, but I don't feel like I can do it if asked to write it from scratch.

My Wicket stack project

One problem that I did run into and could not resolve was how to write a JUnit test case for Wicket. The JUnit assert classes that Wicket provides have very lacking Javadocs and I couldn't figure out how to use most of the methods in the classes. I attempted to write some tests based on what I could figure out, but in the end a coverage report showed that the tests were not working. A specific example would be the submit button; I have three submit buttons and I overrided each one's onSubmit method to do what it's supposed to do. However, I couldn't figure out how to 'press' a specific button in the unit test because the FormTester class (provided by Wicket) only has a submit() and submit(string) method, and the submit(string) method doesn't work when I give it the name of the button. The Javadoc comment for that method is also close to non-existent, only listing it as an alternative method to...something else that it fails to mention.

Although it's easy to see how powerful a tool Wicket can be, it's also disappointing that the Javadocs are poorly written and how it's significantly harder to turn a normally simple program such as a stack into a web application. I was expecting the transition to be easier than this but perhaps this is because I'm still unfamiliar with how to use all the classes. Hopefully by the time DueDates 2.0 rolls around, I'll be able to master the art of Wicket-fu.

You can find a copy of my Wicket stack implementation by clicking here.