As a Wicket neophyte myself I can't comment on most of this, but we
did just look deeply into the notion of subclassing components for the
purpose of making them render as rich text widgets from ExtJS. Having
just done that I will say that there are ALOT of little hidden nits
and difficulties that come up in such an effort. Wicket and ExtJS
both want to control the rendering of the end markup, so when you
replace the generated markup with Ext widgets, many of Wicket's little
pre-created solutions for various internet use cases breaks. Each
problem is circumventable, but eventually you find yourself almost
writing your own framework rather than extending a framework.
I would really love it if a more experienced Wicket developer took a
serious crack at creating a Wicket extension that worked with rich
internet controls. I get the feeling that my effort failed as much
because I didn't have deep Wicket knowledge as anything else.
Brian Mulholland
On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 12:30 AM, Andrei Voden <are...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi. I have been developing for a while using Freemarker + some JS
> frameworks (like ExtJS, Dojo and JQuery) and Java as Model building on
> back-end. Now I hear lots of talks about Wicket so Im trying to understand
> pros and cons. After reading intro in Wicket I have mixed feelings. Below
> are my conclusions. I know Im biased but dont take it as offense. Instead
> rather as my misunderstanding since Im really trying to see if Wicket
> is thing to switch to.
>
> Pros:
>
> -Seems like this is good for companies where you have Java programmers that
> you can now utilize for building Front-end.
>
> - Clean HTML code and all logic handled by Java.
>
> - Quick to start building simple apps that fall into the box of the
> framework.
>
> - No JScript or HTML/CSS knowledge needed. Can separate easier Frot-end and
> Back-end developers --> easier to hire.
>
> Cons:
>
> - On other hand, as Front-end developer this looks weird to me since I feel
> like I don't have full control of JScript code.
>
> 1) Since Wicket uses Java for generating HTML/CSS/JScript UI controls for
> me meaning if I need to tweak those controls outside of their box it maybe
> problematic. In my experience any framework good until you start doing
> something different from what it was intended and then you can spend more
> time trying to do simple out of box thing then using native JScript. Is
> there JScript sources for Wicket controls?
>
> 2) Prototyping: using Freemarker I can do changes and simply refresh page.
> In case of Wicket I need to recompile.
>
> 3) Logic blocks: Looks like Wicket allows injection of values into HTML
> tags with wicket: attribute but how do you handle block logic like
> IF(condition) then {use HTML block1} else { use another HTML block}?
>
> 4) Non html data templating: often during page generation I compose some
> AJAX data from FreeMarker inside tag. How do I do similar things from
> Wicket?
>
> 5) Is it harder/simpler to create custom UI controls in Wicket vs using say
> Dojo, ExtJS or JQuery?
>
> Andrei
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