Wicket at SacJUG

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:

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public class CalculatorApplication extends WebApplication
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public Class getHomePage()
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public final class LoginPage extends WebPage
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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,</p>

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wicket.util.tester

</a>, 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.