Richard Wilkinson’s Blog

So VAT is reduced

<sarcasm>

yay, woo, this will make me spend loads of money

</sarcasm>

So the government reduces VAT by 2.5 percent.  So for every £1000 I spend, I will save a whole £25.

And for that privilage I will get to pay higher taxes in a years time, probably for the next 10 years.

Cant say im convinced.

I’m just waiting for all those systems with a hard coded figure of 17.5% for VAT not being able to handle the change, it could be Y2K all over again.

Tags: vat

A simple wicket and terracotta example

Since the publication of the updated wicket terracotta plugin I have been working on a simple example app.

I decided to use the terracotta maven plugin, which means that you dont need to download anything, maven will do it all for you.

Simply extract the zip file and run

mvn tc:run

Then point your browser at http://localhost:8080/simple-wicket or http://localhost:8081/simple-wicket to see it in action.

You can read more about the terracotta maven plugin on this url

Edit:

I have corrected the typo pointed out to me. Just goes to show that you should test your code in a different user account to the one you have multiple versions of the same project installed in your local maven repo.

You can download the source code here simple-wicket1.zip

Why are there so many java web frameworks?

I try to keep up with the latest java technologies by subscribing to a number of different rss feeds, one of the underlying trends seems to be ‘hey look at my cool new java web framework’ and I keep asking myself why keep reinventing the wheel?  Clearly I’m a big fan of wicket, but I’m not going to get
into a ‘wicket is the best ever’ rant.

Instead i’m going to say that regardless of your requirements, there surely must already be at least one framework that meets practically all of them.  So given that what you want already exists, why go and build it yourself anyway?  Or can they not use google?

But suppose that you do build your own framework, this means that out of all existing frameworks, none meet your requirements (or you can’t use google).  From this we can deduce that you have quite specialized requirements (or you are less computer literate than a 10 year old), meaning that your requirements probably won’t be shared by many other people, so why oh why do you then take your poorly documented, highly specialized code and thrust it upon the world?

We aren’t interested that you can build an entire app that says hello world with one command, or that you have a slightly different method of hacking together java, html, ajax in a ‘really cool way’.

</rant>