Sunday, December 14, 2008

I have an admission to make.. I changed sides to Wicket

I had evaluated Wicket once before in its early days and dismissed it as a toy, but back in August, after frustrations with trying to write 'complete' web applications, not just for processing xml with Cocoon I tried it again... and absolutely loved it. I have since built a handful of web applications for different clients across the UK, NHS, University and other with Wicket and the Apache Jackrabbit repository backing it up.

The combination of Wicket and Jackrabbit is very powerful indeed. While the verbose nature of Java means nothing is particularly compact with Wicket, the componentisation capabilities are amazing! I love the code re-use possibilities. Every problem can be broken down into is constituent parts.

I don't know much yet about the performance I can expect to see when building webapps with Wicket, its something I will have to read up on.

I have been reading with interest over the last few months how the hippo guys are doing the same. It will be interesting to check out their latest cms release when it is out of beta.