Introduction to Wicket

Wicket is a framework to build a user interface for webapplications with the Java programming language. The framework was founded by Jonathan Locke and was open sourced in 2004. It graduated from incubation with the Apache Foundation in June 2007 and is now a top level project at apache.org.

My first Wicket project was in the first half of 2006. I was hired by a customer to strengthen their development team. The team had just been through a process of selecting their preferred web framework for future projects and they selected Wicket over JSF and Tapestry. Prior to that project, I had my first experience with JSF for a short while and I was very positively surprised by Wicket for the low learning curve, esp. compared to JSF. I immediately could materialize my Swing-experience with Wicket, since developing with Wicket has the same feel as developing with Swing. I became an enthousiast, but after that project in 2006, I had not been on projects where Wicket was used. I worked with a number of people on other projects though, who also had experience with Wicket. We would often sigh and reminisce "Wish we were using Wicket. That would've saved us so much time!", and the other guys would respond "Oh yes, and it would be so much more fun!".

I recently started a privately funded project that ultimately must result in my pension plan. For this project I will use Wicket to build the user interface. As of October 1, 2008, I will be working full time on this project for the next half year and I expect to be able to write some tutorials on parts of Wicket that are not yet covered elsewhere. The first one will cover the DataTable from wicket-extensions.