On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Lester Chua <cicowic...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > I've finished converting major portions of an existing in-house application > from EXTJS/JSON Servlets to Wicket as part of an evaluation of Wicket. > Right now I'm VERY impressed with the framework and would like to introduce > it to the organization I'm working for. > > There are a couple of things that I could not find and was wondering if the > Wicket Team have them but somehow failed to make them available in the > Wicket Site. > I hope someone can help me out if this is available but I had somehow missed > it. > > 1) Product Roadmap (Release plans, upcoming features etc) > This is important to us because it will at least indicate the intentions of > Wicket Team. As any technology that is adopted enterprise-wide needs to be > long-lived and well supported in addition to it's features and technology, > some visibility about the product lifecycle is required.
we do not publish an official road map because its "one more thing to maintain" that is not wicket. up until now there was no interest in one because we often discuss our plans on the mailing list. > 2) Recent Adoption Statistics (No of downloads, usage projections) > We need this to gauge the interest in the project. Has it peaked? What is > the pattern like? number of downloads are pretty meaningless since most users get wicket through the maven repo and there are no statistics available for those. especially because these repos are also proxied. eg if ibm has a maven proxy then the wicket jar is only downloaded once although potentially used by every ibm developer. > Some comments about Wicket (project/product aspects), this is not a critique > but just observations that may be wrong, do correct me if I had missed > something or have some wrong impression about Wicket site. > > a) Although there is examples and documentation available on Wicket main > site and Wicket stuff, I find that the organization of the information is > probably not friendly enough for easy viewing. E.g. the examples site does > not contain source and viewable example together in an easy to read page. > This can be improved on significantly. there is a "source code" link in the gray header of every example. i agree, this is not the prettiest nor the coolest out there, but it gets the job done. our users are more then welcome to submit patches to make it better. we are still actively developing improvements to wicket itself so sometimes projects like examples get sidelined due to our limited resources. > b) Having a Wicket Stuff site that does not appear updated nor actively > maintained will HURT the project in terms of it's adoption. i wouldnt say that wicket-stuff is officially affiliated with wicket itself. it is a playground for developers who use wicket to share ideas. > Wicket is FANTASTIC as a component based solution to our current web > development landscape. I am preaching to the sold when I say that it's easy > to use and yet flexible to do moderately complex stuff productively. Being > such an easy to use component framework, I am really puzzled about why the > plugin development seems so bare what kinds of components were you missing when building your project? > (in comparison to other frameworks I'm used > to like JQuery, ExtJS, Grails, Ruby on Rails etc). extjs is also quiet bare. i was not able to find a lot of things i was looking for when building an app using it. jquery has a ton of plugins but most of them are garbage, and that makes it very difficult to sift through and find a good one. you get a plugin, it works, great. then you try to do something and it doesnt. fine, you think, i will just go into the source and tweak it. you open the source and your eyes start bleeding. this has been my experience with probably 80% of jquery plugins ive used. > In fact, Wicket makes > plugin deployment and integration seem like a piece of cake compared to some > of the frameworks mentioned earlier. And yet, wicket seems woefully > underpowered in the plugins department and worse, the official site seems > abandoned which will definitely harm Wicket's adoption rate. http://wicket.apache.org/ is abandoned? i remember updating it just a few weeks ago with the new 1.4.3 release.... > c) The mailing list is wonderful and I have had some questions very quickly > answered, which points to an active and supportive community for which I'm > grateful. If there is a way to harness this and make the information more > easily accessible, it'll be awesome. http://markmail.org is a wonderful tool for searching apache mailing lists. > Ok, enough bitching =), I love Wicket! Hopefully, I can become proficient > enough to actively contribute to the documentation to make this great > framework more accessible to newbies like myself. yeah, we hear that a lot -igor > But first, I need to sell > my team and management on the long term product aspects of Wicket. > > Any help or information about point 1 & 2 is greatly appreciated. > > Lester > > On a more irrelevant note when I first started web development back in 1999, > I was wondering if I could use Rational Rose to generate a UML model of my > web project (it can't). But now with wicket, I can fully reverse engineer a > UML model that MAKES SENSE for my Wicket App! Ok, I may not want to do that > now, but it's actually possible, try doing that with any other web > framework. > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@wicket.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@wicket.apache.org > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@wicket.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@wicket.apache.org
