It’s been about 6 months now since our development team picked up the Wicket framework. So far, so good! It’s been enjoyable to code using this framework, and it has certainly been a productivity booster.  It’s really helped to streamline our processes for our applications and helps to keep our look and feel consistent.

Some of the things I love about wicket are as follows:

• Component Based
• Separation of code and markup
• Minimal XML, Java handles the configuration
• The community is active and helpful
• The core framework focuses on needs, and extensions fulfill specific cases

Some of the things I dislike:

• There are many extensions, too many it seems.  It would be great if wicket could filter this down, possibly to a more focused extensions package.
• The separation of code and markup takes some getting used to in terms of using dynamic javascript (I am used to managing these within a page, or with includes [ie: php and ruby])

Overall, if you are a Java shop looking to build web applications at a faster pace, keeping things organized and having fun writing Java, this is an excellent framework to adopt.

More to come on this framework.

I ran across this site today and I am glad I did. Refresh the Triangle seems right up my alley in terms of development and design, and it’s local. It’s also sponsored by companies from around the Triangle. This is great and something I always love finding out about. Hopefully I can make it over to this from time to time. It looks like it is hosted on the last Thursday of every month.  This is something that looks to be growing, and certainly worth checking out