What are the advantages of Apache Wicket? [closed]

Question

I'm not a Java developer so I might get some terms wrong... but.

An application I integrate with is moving from Spring to Wicket. While it should not affect my integration with it I got to wondering why they would do this?

From what I know Spring is the more popular framework. I know nothing about it except it's popular. I did read the Wicket page and Wicket seems really simple and straightforward.

What are some of the advantages of Wicket?

It seems to me that changing your entire framework would be some work so I wonder if Wicket offers something that Spring does not?

Answer 1

Advantages that often get touted in circles I frequent are:

1. Your html can be fully xhtml compliant - there is a VERY nice separation of presentation and logic in that the only thing your presentation/html layer needs to know about wicket are wicketid attributes in standard html tags. This is wonderful for the html/css/javascript client side guy on your team who does little to no actual java work. No other java based web framework can claim this, afaik.
2. No xml config for anything wicket specific - everything can be done in source and very little needs to be done to the standard web.xml for your .war
3. component based development is pretty easy to grok - especially if you have a non web background (e.g. a swing programmer). it encourages reuse quite a bit more than mvc does, imo.

Answer 2

Here are some features of apache wicket:

POJO Component Model

Pages and Components in Wicket are real Java objects that support encapsulation, inheritance and events.

Ease of Development

Because Wicket is Java and HTML, you can leverage what you know about Java or your favorite HTML editor to write Wicket applications.

Separation of Concerns

Wicket does not mix markup with Java code and adds no special syntax to your markup files. The worlds of HTML and Java are parallel and associated only by Wicket ids, which are attributes in HTML and Component properties in Java. Since Wicket HTML is just HTML and Wicket Java is just Java, coders and designers can work independently to a large degree and without relying on any special tools.

Secure

Wicket is secure by default. URLs do not expose sensitive information and all component paths are session-relative. Explicit steps must be taken to share information between sessions. Furthermore URL encryption allows highly secure web sites.

Transparent, Scalable Clustering Support

All Wicket applications will work on a cluster automatically and without additional work. Once bottlenecks are understood, Wicket enables tuning of page state replication. The next version of Wicket will support client-side models for zero-state scalability.

Transparent Back Button Support

Wicket supports configurable page version management. When users submit a form or follow a link from a page they accessed with the back button in their browser, Wicket is able to revert the page object to the state it was in when the page was originally rendered. This means you can write web applications that support the back button with very little work.

Multi-tab and multi-window support

Wicket provides an easy way to write application that supports multi-window and multi-tab usage allowing developer to react properly when users open new browser window or tab

Reusable Components

Reusable components in Wicket are particularly easy to create. Not only can you extend existing components with the Java extends keyword, but you can also create Panel components which associate a group of components as a reusable unit.

Simple, Flexible, Localizable Form Validation

It is trivial to write and use validators in Wicket. It is also quite easy to customize and localize the display and content of validation error messages.

Typesafe Sessions

Wicket eliminates the need to manage HttpSession attributes by hand. Page and component objects are transparently stored in the session and your application can create a custom session subclass with typesafe properties as well. All objects stored in the session can automatically participate in clustering replication.

Factory Customizable

Wicket is very extensible. Most operations are customizable through factories or factory methods.

Detachable Models

Model objects in Wicket can be very lightweight in terms of memory and network use in a cluster. When a model is used, it can “attach”, populating itself with information from persistent storage. When the model is no longer in use, transient information can be reset, reducing the size of the object.

Border Components

Wicket Border components enable the decoration of pages in a reusable fashion. This is especially useful for inheritance of common navigational structures or layout.

Support for All Basic HTML Features

Wicket supports image tags, links, forms and everything else that you’re used to using in your web application development.

Programmatic Manipulation of Attributes

Wicket Components can programmatically change any HTML tag attribute.

Automatic Conversions

Once a Form validates, the model can be updated using Wicket converters. Most ordinary conversions are built-in and it is easy to write new converters.

Dynamic Images

Wicket makes image use, sharing and generation very easy. Dynamic images can be created by simply implementing a paint method.

Pageable ListView

ListViews in Wicket are extremely powerful. You can nest any kind of component in a ListView row, even other ListViews. PageableListView supports navigation links for the large lists.

Tree Component

Out of the box tree component for navigating and selecting nodes.

Localization

HTML pages, images and resource strings can all be localized.