Hi fellow Wicketers,
I've been using Wicket for about 4 years now and, as predicted, I'm addicted to the productivity I get by being able to perform unconstrained object oriented design and development at both the model and user interface layers. My company has been contracted by a very large multinational company to build a website for a government body. Naturally I want to use Wicket as the code is so optimal and so development will be much more productive but some at the company are pushing for GWT even though they have zero Java experience and obviously no experience in either Wicket or GWT. To counter the problem of doing all the ugly RPC normally required by GWT to bind UI elements with domain objects they are proposing to use a third party tool that manages some of that 'object marshalling RPC madness" through some XML configuration and some specific interface implementations. It sounds like the third party tool is there to 'workaround' the 'hack' that is normally required when binding UIs to models when coding with GWT. My philosophy is "if you don't use a hack in the first place then you don't need to work around the hack". I showed them Wicket and I built a sample app and they were impressed with the small amount of code required to build UIs that interact with underlying domain models but they seem to be desiring the GWT + third party solution because they need to be able to satisfy unit test/verification and non specific 'popularity' criteria to their client. Given that a significant part of the third party tool is commercial/closed source, I'm not sure how they will perform the unit test/verification testing. The 'popularity' test is very vague but I understand it's purpose, they want to ensure that they use products that are widely used and have an active user community: which is very true of Wicket. Does anyone have some numbers on this? Like how many Wicket developers there are, or how many websites are Wicket driven? Is there a page on the wicket website that contains a list of the companies/products that use Wicket - if not, should we add one? Any other points I should bring to the customer's attention to help them in their decision?
