GWT VS Wicket

Posted by: Eelco Hillenius on janvier 30, 2008 in response to Message #246495 (www.theserverside.com)


First of all, I feel the frameworks or close to each other because they are good options for scaling your development effort. They both focus on providing a pure OO Java programing model. Imho, both are a good choice, and you should look what works best for your particular situation.

GWT is Ajax only, keeps state on the client and works with layout managers. Wicket supports both Ajax and a traditional model (mix however you like), keeps state on the server and works with templates rather than layout managers (though you could completely abstract this and hide the markup if you really wanted).

Plenty of pros and cons to both.

For instance, keeping state on the client obviously makes clustering easier. But you won't take advantage of locality, run into problems (or at least inefficiencies) when using ORM tools like Hibernate, and you'll have to very thoroughly think through the security implications of having state on the client and communicating that with the server.

Layout managers... On the one hand it is nice to have that ugly HTML and CSS abstracted for you. On the other hand, your design mockups are more removed from your end-code, and it will be more difficult to hire separate designers to do the layout part for you. Also, customizing layout managers may be more painful than just writing straightforward markup yourself.

You have to decide whether Ajax-only works for you. For the site that I'm building, which targets tens of thousands of users in very diverse environments, we choose not to take the risk of running into problems with old browser versions, zealous administrators, etc. Also, if you need your site to be indexed and have parts of it bookmarkable, Wicket is a better choice. But if you're going Ajax all the way, GWT might be better at certain things.

Another thing Wicket is very good at - better than any other framework I know - is support for localization. In GWT this was implemented as an afterthought, though it might be good by now (I haven't looked at GWT for over a year).

This comparison can go on for a while, but I'm out of time :-) Like I said, I think both frameworks are good choices, so if you have time to look at them both, you should (buy GWT In Action and Wicket In Action :-) ). And don't forget to ask around for people who actually worked with the frameworks and ask how they liked it.