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.
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?
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.
b) Having a Wicket Stuff site that does not appear updated nor actively
maintained will HURT the project in terms of it's adoption.
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 (in comparison to
other frameworks I'm used to like JQuery, ExtJS, Grails, Ruby on Rails
etc). 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.
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.
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. 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.
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