Not A Java Web Frameworks Survey: Just use Wicket!

‘Java Web Frameworks Survey’ was my first blog posted which was reposted at dzone. Sadly there never was a follow up of it. Although I planned followups with jZeno, SpringMVC, Seam, Vaadin (at that time: IT-Mill Toolkit), MyFaces, Stripes, Struts, ItsNat, IWebMvc

Now, today I have just a short, subjective mini-follow-up, for anyone who is interested after all those months. Over the months I have additionally investigated JSF, Rails, Vaadin and one more:

• No comments to JSF :-/
• Rails is great! Especially the db migrations and other goodies. Partials are a crap: I prefer component based UI frameworks. If you don’t like ruby take a look at grails with autobase.
• Additionally I highly recommend everyone to take a look at vaadin (‘server-side GWT’) if you need a stateful webapplication. Loading time was a problem for me. Other client-side performance problems can be solved if you use CssLayout, I think.

But for jetwick I chose wicket! There were/are 10 reasons:

• great performance,
• ease of use (highly subjective, of course),
• component based + no routing,
• good documentation and active community,
• ajax fallback and simplicity,
• quick get-started,
• out-of-the-box back-button support,
• integrated testing support,
• unbeaten separation of html and Java code
• and a simple guice integration

The most important thing is: if you use ‘mvn jetty:run’ and NetBeans in combination then the development cycle feels like Rails: modify html, css or even Java code. Save and hit F5 in the browser. Nothing more.

The only problem is the database migration (wicket solves only the UI problems). For that I would use liquibase. Or simply run db4o, a nosql solution ‘or’ solr.

From http://karussell.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/not-a-java-web-frameworks-survey-just-use-wicket/