The first "Date" with Apache Wicket !

Many JAVA developers didn't hear about Apache Wicket before, I was one of them too, but a happy occasion happened and I met Wicket !


When you are planning to build JAVA web application you have many choices, the first one is JSP and JAVA servlets, but for advanced application you need a framework make things more easy and enhance your productivity.


I've searched about JAVA frameworks before, I've checked Struts2, Spring MVC, JBoss Seam, Apache Tapestry and JSF, but actually I didn't applied them into any application, I've just tested them a little, so I didn't fall in love with these frameworks really !


Last month I decided to begin new "ambitious" project, and I was need a free JAVA framework, at other hand I was afraid of using these frameworks because of "XML tags soup", so Wicket was my decision at last for these reasons:

1. It's free and open source
2. It's Component Centric approach
3. Swing-like Object Oriented Component Model
4. No XML soup
5. Just plain Java and HTML 
6. There's many reuseable and flexible components

I had a look at couple books, Wicket in action and  Wicket Cookbook, the first one aimed for bigginers but I found it somehow "buggy" and confusing, while Wicket Cookbook is more clear and divided to sample with clear and complete description, so I recommend to go for Wicket website tutorials and examples first, then you can read Wicket Cookbook for great and usefull Wicket capabilities.

I'll post a tutorials about Wicket later, but for now if you tried Wicket let'us know your opinion ;)