You can download the first chapter of Wicket In Action for free here:
http://manning.com/dashorst/ and some chapters of Tapestry In Action
here: http://manning.com/lewisship/
Actually, Tapestry in Action is pretty old and covers only Tapestry 3. I
would advice downloading chapters 1-4 of 'Enjoying Web Development With
Tapestry' (http://www.agileskills2.org/EWDT). This covers Tapestry 4. A
lot of changes have been made from Tapestry 3 to Tapestry 4.
I'm just starting to learn Wicket now and I can confirm that learning
Wicket is easier that learning Tapestry. I'm sure others on this list
can tell you a lot more about Wicket than I can.
I personally feel more in control with Tapestry since every part of the
framework can be tweaked, overridden and enhanced easily once you know
your way around the framework and you have full control of what objects
are stored on the session and when and you can let code inject pure html
into the page wherever you like if you want to.
With Wicket I can quickly start developing pages but it feels like I
need to think much harder about how to do things without filling up the
Session with data, since it tries much harder to be smart for you behind
the scenes. It does this to make the developers more productive, but I
don't always trust that kind of smartness and I'm always afraid that any
List I'm showing gets stored on the session without me knowing about it.
I'm probably just a control-freak and this is just part of the Wicket
learning curve. I'm sure I'll feel more comfortable once I get to know
it better.
Some things I didn't like about Tapestry:
Classes are abstract (a lot of stuff like getters/setters etc. are
injected into the classes at runtime). It saves on boilerplate code, but
makes testing harder and makes things less obvious. A lot of injections
are done using either XML or Annotations with Strings of text in them.
This doesn't give you any type-safety and forces you to continuously
browse through the documentation. The learning curve is pretty steep
(mainly because of the notorious rewind-phase that confuses a lot of
developers) and it seems that every major release is incompatible with
previous releases, forcing you to re-learn a lot.
That said, once you know Tapestry, it is very productive and really a
pleasure to use. As is Wicket from what I've seen so far.
Regards,
Onno
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