a content area which usually contains the functional part of the page.

a footer with generic informations like web master's email, the company address, etc.

a left menu with a bunch of links to different areas/functionalities of the site.

a header which could contain site title, some logos, a navigation bar, etc.

The sample layout we will use is a typical page layout consisting of the following areas: In this chapter we will see how to use Wicket to build a site layout. Then, we manually insert these areas in every page including the appropriate markup fragments. With the adoption of server side technologies like JSP, ASP or PHP the tag has been replaced by a template-based approach where we divide our page layout into some common areas that will be present in each page of our web application. For example is still being used by JavaDoc. Over the years this tag has almost disappeared from our code and it survives only in few specific domains.

In those days we used to organize our page layout using the HTML tag. There was a time in the 90s when Internet was just a buzzword and watching a plain HTML page being rendered by a browser was a new and amazing experience. Probably this is not the most interesting use we can get out of Wicket, but it is surely the simplest one so it's the best way to get our hands dirty with some code.ĥ.1 Header, footer, left menu, content, etc. 5.5 Summary 5 Wicket as page layout managerīefore going ahead with more advanced topics, we will see how to maintain a consistent layout across our site using Wicket and its component-oriented features.

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