Wicket experiences

Posted on October 23, 2007 by vkomulai

I decided to take a look at the Wicket web-framework for Java. It looks very promising and simple, if familiar with component oriented programming. Earlier I had done some Struts 1.x and plain old Servlets, and boy does this really look like something else. As the first “real” project I started to build my personal contact book for managing addresses, phonenumbers etc. Also in this one I went for EJB3.0 SessionBeans to gain some experiences from the updated spec.

Things I like in wicket (after a day of test-development of ContactBook app)

  • Easy to start developing Wicket apps (short learning curve)
  • Coding conventions, no messy configuration
    • Linking Page model to view
    • Resource-messages from bundles
  • Truly component oriented approach (for a long term swing developer)
  • Very descriptive error messages
  • Form validation works like magic
  • Tiles-like page inheritence

Things I don’t like in wicket (after a day of test-development of ContactBook app)

  • The documentation is scattered, there are lot’s of small examples here and there, but a was not able to find a single very valuable resource

Links

Filed under: Java EE

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