Wicket at SacJUG
jsf, test driven development, software development
We had a sort of ad-hoc demonstration of Wicket at the local Sacramento Java Users group (SACJUG) this week. Out of about 25 people there two people are actually using Wicket. Since there are a ton of web frameworks and we ended up in the JSF camp I just don’t spend a lot of time looking at new options, but spending an hour or so watching a demo wasn’t going to kill me.
Wicket is very component centric and I like the syntax:
public class CalculatorApplication extends WebApplication
public Class getHomePage()
public final class LoginPage extends WebPage
public final class LoginForm extends Form
And it has some nice features:
- Stateful by default.
- No JSP pages.
- You can use the back button.
- Minimum reliance on special tools.
Of course my favorite is the POJO centric nature and the fact that they just build their unit testing support package, wicket.util.tester, into the main API. Almost makes me want to spend some time playing around with it, but I think I’ll wait until I see some more uptake, since there are far too many web frameworks and no winner or limited pool of winners currently.
Ed Gibbs @ February 16, 2007
Oh, who needs a winner? Just pick the framework that works best for you, no matter what the rest of the world tells you
Btw, Igor, one of the core developers of Wicket lives in Sacramento. Too bad he couldn’t make it to the JUG.
Yeah, igor where where you!
Picking the framework is a very political situation as I assume it is in most environments. Our shop started with Coldfusion long before I arrived moved to Fusebox, and then to Struts about 3 years ago as we started to move to J2EE. Then we debated about replacement options including JSF, Spring MVC, and just staying with Struts. Turns out at a CIO level the decision was made to move whole hog to IBM Websphere and to use JSF for everything. We’re still paying for that decision in some ways, but it’s made and not reversible on a political front.
If it were totally my decision I’d probably do RoR right now, but I don’t see an opening in our organization to switch. It just isn’t a ’safe’ enough Gartner approved option. At a short glance though I do like the look and feel of Wicket’s APIs.
Maybe I’ll check with the SACJUG organizer on getting someone like Igor out to do a talk. The presentation this time was just really spur of the moment by one of our regulars.