I read Matt's entry on Why Wicket Looks Cool and thought I would give it a go myself. I actually haven't even heard about Wicket until today. My very first thought was "Man, this looks like a Tapestry clone". And while Wicket and Tapestry are very similar, there are noticable differences. For example, and the most notably, all the component decalarations and definitions seem to be done inside a java class instead of Tapestry's .page XML files. That's not the only difference mind you but I haven't looked at it long enough to really get into any other specifics.
It seems solid and performance was good for the few small test apps I created. The biggest problem is, of course, documentation, as Matt stated. I understand that documentation is a work in progress and there are book *talks* but nothing immediately on the horizon. The mailing list is also not very active, at least today.
I'm going to keep chugging away at it for a few days just to get a firm grasp on it. I always like to know about the latest and greatest frameworks. It helps remind my why I don't like using them. HA. Anyway, more to come as I go along...
Java Notes From My Desktop
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Posted by gthought on April 19, 2005 5:30:16 PM CDT
You talk about a book chicken and egg problem, but, not having a book doesn't mean you can't have good documentation. I contend with Tapestry the most useful documentation is right on the Tapestry web site. Write up the documentation and post it to your website as HTML or PDF or whatever. Give people information to get going and get a userbase. If you aren't going to write documentation until you will get paid to do so, I fear your product is already sunk. I was using Tapestry long before there was a book. When Tapestry 3.0 beta came out (which is when I started using it) and it didn't have an adequate tutorial I re-wrote the 2.3 tutorial myself and put the PDF on my website. I STILL get a ton of people thanking me for this tutorial... even if there is a book many people want to experiment before they spend money on a book. At least I had the 2.3 tutorial to work from (which wasn't enough for a lot of people).
Comment from Anonymous on July 21, 2005 3:18:38 PM CDT
Indeed surprisely found wicket and was very delighted that such library exists. I think it's a good idea reducing number of sources of defenitions. Ideally only two should be presented
1. presentation
2. business logic
This framework is closed to it.
Comment from Anonymous on May 5, 2006 3:26:32 PM CDT
[…]Wizards, GUIs, editors, mice, keyboards and ASCII are all unnecessary abstractions designed to provide an illusion of productivity, while really just getting in the way of how traditional developers work.[…]
Comment from power laptop battery on July 1, 2008 9:51:44 PM CDT
TrackBack to http://radio.javaranch.com/gthought/addTrackBack.action?entry=1113949816039
Thank you for checking out Wicket. I know the lack of documentation is not helping us. We are working on that, but somehow it still is hard to write... Writing a book is always a problem: publishers don't want to print a book when there is no userbase (i.e. no customers), users don't want to use a framework for which there is no book... Somehow a chicken and an egg problem.
That the users list is quiet can also mean that the framework is doing what it is supposed to do: be very easy to use ;-). The lack of usable statistics on sourceforge makes it hard for us to determine whether the low traffic on the userlist is due to low usage or ease of use.
But please let us hear from you on the user list!