Reinhard Poetz pisze: > I've started to look into Wicket because I'm not satisfied with what > I've used so far (cForms, JSF, Tapestry 4, Struts) when it comes to the > development of *rich client apps* in XHTML/CSS/JS. From what I've seen > I'm impressed but not fully convinced yet because there are two other > appealing approaches available: 1) GWT and 2) Ajax/REST. > > GWT offers an even more appealing programming model than Wicket because > you don't have to deal with HTML at all, though I'm not sure if this is > an advantage or disadvantage. I'm also not sure how easy it is to change > the look'n'feel of a GWT app. > > The Ajax/REST alternative (Daniel and Marc were thinking loud about such > an approach recently) is a third interessting option for me. Since I'm a > fan of ROA and many Ajax frameworks have made great progress for the > last years, it would be my first choice. The downside is the poor tool > support compared to the two others.
I don't know GWT so won't comment. When it comes to AJAX I'm sceptic... One of the most important characteristic of REST is statelessness of the server. It must be a client that takes burden of tracking state and flow of application. "Rich" doesn't only mean flashy buttons and suggest-like textboxes but most importantly rich reaction to the data coming from server. Client must have rich enough set of capabilities to figure out what it has to do next (like following links in documents obtained from server behind the scene). Are you sure that current state of things in AJAX world enables you to write fully RESTful clients already? How about complicated flow handled by AJAX application? Have you (or anyone else) considered using JavaFX for building rich clients embedded into web page? This technology is in very early stages of shaping but already looks interesting and Sun seems to take it seriously so we can expect such badly needed improvements like quicker start up time of Java applications in browser. There was quite significant blog-coverage when JavaFX was announced and I think there is an interest in this technology in Java community as whole. Anyone interested in playing with it? IMHO, Ajax, even very successful, is just a transient technology that is going to be marginalized by real RIA solution. There are three big players out there: Adobe with its Apollo, Microsoft with Silverlight and recently Sun crushed the party with its JavaFX. I'm not sure who is going to win but you should notice that there is no Ajax on this list. > I guess that you can use the Cocoon source resolver within Wicket right > now. You only need to get access to the Spring application context and > perform a lookup to get a reference. (Provided that you implement the > missing wrapper methods which Grek mentioned recently.) Not really, see http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg53587.html. Is it hard to configure Wicket servlet to be used by servlet-service-fw? -- Grzegorz Kossakowski http://reflectingonthevicissitudes.wordpress.com/
