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.

We provide custom XSL outputs for some of our clients at work. One of the custom outputs started failing when we patched our version of Java. The culprit, make sure your <fo:table-header> tags have content in them. If they are empty, remove the tag altogether.

We are a Java shop at work. Recently we decided to adopt a framework that would meet our needs as we begin to phase out some of our legacy code and add new features. We decided to go with Wicket. We will see how it goes over the next few months. My plan is to write about what we learn from it here.