Wicket in the press
There’s a nice article on Wicket by Timothy M. O’Brien on OnJava; it is not interesting because Timothy is a Wicket expert (in fact, this is not the case), but because it is a sort of “first impression” of a guy who has come through the documentation and code samples. And, as we all know, there’s just one first impression, and it is so important when we are evaluating a new framework.
Anyway, Timothy points out what are in his opinion the most important pros and cons of Wicket.
Cons:
Wicket is an awful code explosion, written by Java-intoxicated programmers. If you are looking for lightweight, nimble framework, a framework that could conceivably be used by semi-programmers or the usual half-wits who occupy your average corporate IT stable, this is not the framework for you.
Pros:
It requires some up front investment of time, and the documentation isn’t 100%, but the applications I wrote in Wicket are cleanly designed and easy to modify. It is a refreshing change of pace for anyone grown accustomed to the disaster that is Struts 1.x, and along with Tapestry it is one of the logical choices if you are looking for a component-oriented alternative to Java Server Faces [...] I use Wicket when I need to create an extremely AJAXified interface, something much more than simple DIV replacement.
Let me add just a few considerations based on my experience with Wicket so far:
- First of all, the learning curve isn’t really so high. You doesn’t need to know any complex tag library… you need to know only plain HTML, and a Swing-like API (which is quite intuitive, and obviously benefits of all the support given by modern Java IDEs)
- If you are worried about code complexity, check out Wicket 2; it will take some time to be released, but IMHO it has some interesting API improvements
- Being “lightweight” isn’t just a matter of having the right API, or a cool markup language; I see Wicket as a great infrastructure for writing your web applications, and I think it will become more lightweight when the (growing and active) community will be able to create new components (check wicket-stuff, for instance) and a better IDE support. Right now I’m trying to work on this direction, so expect some news in the next few months.
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