While I was on holiday my ADSL provider doubled the speed of my connection to 2 Mbits. Guess I should go on vacations more frequently:)

I've noticed the change while downloading Hibernate's 19MB jar file: the progress bar was moving suspiciously fast.

Hibernate is one of the skills I'm hoping to update the next few weeks. I've last used it at version 2.0 together with Struts for a middle-sized web development project. Now I want to give it a try as the persistent strategy for a Wicket based application. The app is actually a home project: my girlfriend's father runs a chess book publishing business which has a very outdated static website and they've asked me nicely whether I would have some time to help with transitioning it into this century. I wouldn't like to lose my affinity for Java and after reading Gaertjan's blog entries on Wicket I though this would be a perfect opportunity to learn something new.

I've started experimenting with Wicket in NetBeans 4.1 - it was pretty easy to setup. I really like the html based templates of Wicket and the "real" component feeling I get when I use it. You can create reusable authentication pages/panels, reusable web forms and other components using it. And I do mean reusable without modification (just by subclassing a complex component to add new functionality or subclassing an abstract login form to add the functionality that actually logs the user in). Not copy-pastable... It's pretty amazing.

I've also downloaded Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8 Early Access yesterday (it's available from the Sun Download Center) and tried to open my NetBeans 4.1 projects from it. They opened without a problem (I actually had to add Wicket to the Library Manager again to resolve the fact that settings and customizations are not migrated from NetBeans 4.1) and I could create an UML model project by reverse engineering the Java classes for my Wicket pages. I like JSE8. I haven't used any new feature other than UML modelling but it feels more integrated and faster than JSE7's modeller.

A presentation showing the new features of JSE8 is available here (it is also available from the Help menu of JSE8 itself).

Image taken from developers.sun.com