Top 10 reasons why you should try Wicket

If you haven't already tried Wicket so far, here are my top ten reasons why you should:

1. Wicket is now Apache Wicket
Wicket entered Apache incubation last october, and has recently graduated as a top level Apache project. This means that it is now a real Apache project. Why is it important? Because it means that all the legal bits have been cleaned to meet the ASF requirements (and your legal department should be concerned about that :-)), that the project has demonstrated a diverse and active community which is a very good sign of project health, and that the project releases are archived and mirrored all over the world.


2. Wicket 1.3 beta 2 is available
A few days after their graduation, the wicket team has released a second beta version of their 1.3 stream. This version is a huge improvement over the 1.2.x versions, with 339 new features, improvements and bug fixed issues addressed in their JIRA. This version should provide a pretty stable API, so it's a very good time to give it a try.


3. Very active community
If you are not afraid of receiving 1300+ mail a month, I strongly suggest subscribing to the wicket user mailing list. Got a question? 600+ subscribed users will probably provide an answer in the following hours, or even minutes. And since most of the wicket developer team takes time to participate to this list, you will have precise, clear and from the source information in case of real problems. Last but not least, Wicket team has a very good sense of humor :-)


4. Proven web framework
Wicket released its 1.0 version in June 2005, and has regularly provided new versions since then. Even though it's difficult to know exactly the number of wicket application running today, the trend seems to be growing, and having graduated as an Apache project shouldn't reverse the trend :-). Another important fact is how wicket team lead their development: they often provides maintenance release on their production stream (wicket 1.2.6 has been released last April) while they develop the new major version.


5. Neat component model
Wicket provides a neat component model which makes building feature rich and consistent web applications much easier. Anybody with a basic Java knowledge can develop AJAX applications with Wicket, thanks to the AJAX components available. You don't need to have advanced javascript and browser compatibility skills. Moreover, components in Wicket allow to have a clean separation between team members responsibilities. Senior web developers can develop new components, with fancy javascript effects and AJAX behaviors, while junior developers can keep focused on business centric development reusing the component palette available.


6. Creating components is really easy
One of the main benefits of component oriented frameworks is the re usability of components. But is it really interesting if creating a component is too complex? Have you ever tried creating a JSF component? Forget about that, creating components in Wicket is as easy as creating an HTML file and a corresponding (and simple) Java class. And since the HTML file is a regular HTML file, you can very easily test your javascript effects or your CSS within your browser without even launching a web server.


7. Large set of existing components
Out of the box wicket provides a large set of components, including data tables, forms, trees, along with corresponding AJAX versions. With a vibrant community, you can find more and more components contributions, like the wicket contrib dojo project which provides a mapping of many dojo components in wicket, or databinder which provides a very easy to use mapping between wicket and hibernate, with some very nice components too. Since creating component in wicket is easy, many people share their ideas and code about reusable components, providing a large growing source of reusable components.


8. No XML
Wicket is entirely based on plain Java and plan HTML. No XML. No maintenance nightmare of overly big and complex configuration file. Just Java, with excellent IDE support for code completion, refactorings, source code navigation and documentation.


9. Separation of concerns
In Wicket templates are plain HTML files, with only a few ids used to relate HTML tags to Java objects. It makes it very easy for teams with web designers and web developers to work concurrently without stepping on each other. And since templates are plain HTML, the framework ensure you won't ever get business logic in your templates. Do you remember any JSP maintenance nightmare?


10. Clean rendered web application
In wicket component rendering is not too complex, and you can easily read and understand the HTML code produced, and adjust it to your own needs if required. There is no over complex javascript involved. The Java code used to generate HTML is clean, and you can often override rendering by overriding Java methods. Simple yet powerful. Furthermore wicket provide an easy and powerful way to provide clean URLs, by mounting pages and providing a flexible URL coding strategy.