Wicket Buzz
Wicket has appeared in the press in a variety of industry trade magazines, including Network World, ComputerWorld, IT World and Information Week. Presentations on Wicket have been delivered by Wicket team members at JavaOne in San Francisco, Javapolis and TheServerSide Java Symposium in Europe. The following are quotes from reviewers and users of Wicket:
After working with JSF for almost a year, trying Wicket was like that movie scene where the clouds part and this big ray of light hits you in the face. I just had this feeling while JSF’ing that certain things were harder than they needed to be. Well, I was right, and the Wicket people figured it out.
Wicket (currently undergoing incubation with Apache) is a good example of a web framework which throws caution to the wind, and has absolutely no XML needed. We here at Mystic have a lot of love for Wicket and are actively developing several projects with it currently.
Writing a Wicket app is rather more like writing an event-based desktop application than a web application.
“Wickedly Cool” - I actually managed to whip together a Wicket Application in a few days. It is entertaining to work with, adding shiny stuff is really easy while you can develop Java code and keep those last bits of hair you have saved for ripping out in a CSS nightmare that you hopefully after finding Wicket will not have to deal with. So I’d go out on a limb and say that Wicket == Rogaine for developers.
“So is Wicket the one true MVC framework that a lot of us have been hunting for? At the moment, I tend to think so. […] If you like Java you will really like Wicket.”
“I think its an awesome way to deal with this whole web UI framework mess. I am happy to see someone take a simple and clean approach to the whole problem, and come up with a transparent POJO solution. I like the direction the framework is going… Wicket is clean, simple and elegant.”
Comment on TheServerSide.com
“Last week I wrote an article about Wicket and I spent some time discovering and taming it. And I have to confess this: I love it. … snip … Wicket is not a framework, it’s a candy bar. And everybody loves candy bars…”
Comment made by Romain Guy
The issue that impressed me in the Wicket model is that “Wicket does not mix markup with Java code and adds no special syntax to your markup files.” You reference Wicket identities as HTML attributes and define component properties in Java, which allows designers and programmers to work independently (within the obvious constraint of having common goals). There is no need for special tools.
From a Network World editorial entitled “Nothing Sticky about Wicket”
In a recent blog post I asked for feedback on what Web frameworks folks are using. Well, I got quite a surprise: Wicket was the most often recommended framework in reader emails!
From an About.com article entitled And the Winner is…Wicket
“I have used Wicket since last Fall for personal projects. I have 3 kids and a wife so my free-time is very limited. Given that, I had to be very picky about which framework I chose. I’ve been very impressed with how little hassle it has been to start creating powerful, reusable components and pages with Wicket even under rather severe time constraints.”
Comment on TheServerSide.com
”…after using web MVC frameworks for a couple of years, building ever more complex web applications, I moved to component based frameworks. Of these, I think Wicket is by far the best…”
Comment on Manageability.org
”… Talk about a mind blowing experience, it literally took me ten minutes to have a sample application up and running! The Wicket API is very Swing like, which was a welcome change for me, and allowed for a very familiar development experience. There is even an extension that allows for direct use of a Swing TreeModel. There are so many things that I like about this framework …”
From a blog item by the Code Poet
“Wicket has a learning flat.”
Al Maw
JSF is Cool and young but Wicket is younger and even cooler. Have you tried wicket?. I am also building a large CRUD application for Job Exchange System in my country using Wicket + JPA + Stateless EJB3 + Glassfish (the latest promoted build of glassfish) and we are currently in testing phase and I am not having any serious headaches as things seems to be under control. All our forms are Ajax. We have several concurrent accesses and system is stable. I believe greatly in the Wicket Project especially for CRUD cases.
“focuses the development efforts in the right place, inside plain Java code” !! This was the winning ticket for me. The framework is truly amazing. I used ever dang framework in the book and can say that I’m most impressed with this one.
Shocking simplicity. Back to the roots. Thanks.
Wicket as far as I am concerned is the way forward for web development in Java. A lot of creativity involved though especially with the loops but It makes Web Development so much fun.
“Wicket became my favorite framework in about a 24-hour period, and I think it has a very bright future. With most frameworks I see limitations, with Wicket I see possibilities. There’s your platitude for the day :)”
wicket-user mailing list
“Count me in… I’ve only been using Wicket for maybe 2 weeks or so, and I’m sold.”
Phillip Rhodes
Once I grasped the essence of Wicket, everything just started working so well. Damn you, Wicket, I said under my breath. I was really disappointed that I liked it so much. Damn you Wicket! Suddenly I loved all those Wicket developers, because I understood what they were trying to say. Web development can be simple, yet have unlimited power.
Closet Wicket lover