Take that, Ruby On Rails
14 01 2008The Digg entry for Wicket’s 1.3 release announcement on The Server Side has an interesting comment: “I recently converted a Rails site to Wicket. Wicket really cuts down on template spaghetti code. I can honestly say that wicket’s OO approach is the right way of doing things for web application development. If anyone is interested in the site I mentioned, http://fabulously40.com/ “.It’s good to read a statement like this in public for a change.
I can confirm similar results on my own experimental projects. I’ve never done anything “real” with Rails, because every time I get reasonably far into the project, things become too unwieldy and I run back to Wicket. :-)
For dirt-simple CRUD stuff, Rails is unbeatable. But if you get *anywhere* beyond basic scaffolding, Wicket is going to be far less painful. Let’s also not forget that Wicket is Java, and so its tools are far above-and-beyond anything Rails can match.
Wow, http://www.dzone.com/links/rss/take_that_ruby_on_rails.html got voted off right away. Don’t anger the RoR kids!
Wicket is one of the best web frameworks out there. And I tested lots of them (Struts, JSF, Spring MVC, Rails, Django, Plone …). But nothing comes close to the elegance of Wicket. The thing with Wicket is, however, that you need to know about OOP/OOD. Many web developers are so used to “hacking” that they will refuse to give a true OO framework a try. But it’s absolutely worth it imho. Wicket makes developing complex apps so much more easier and much more maintable.
The most unbeatable combination I’ve found so far:
Wicket+JPOX = everything just works on two massive enterprise apps we have developed. Complexity of the app does not increase exponentially as the functionality of the app increases. It’s much closer to a linear increase - which is the ideal.
I just get the feeling the RoR lads are people who can’t be bothered/don’t understand/too close minded to learn OO. Far too many recent ‘popular’ technologies give false hope that their developers can build applications without understanding basic OO architectural principles that have been established and proven themselves over at least 20 years, yes even before the www was invented.
OO is the only true way to avoid the complexity of your app spirally out of control exponentially as it grows. This was true in the days of desktop application development in C++ and it is true today in web app development in any language.
Wicket authors realized this and have created a truly component based OO framework that unashamedly embraces the full power of OO to allow Java developers to build extremely large, scalable enterprise web applications while maintaining a manageable, robust, high quality and elegant architecture and code base.
There, I said it.
@Lars - you didn’t list my new favorite, Seaside (http://seaside.st) on your list. It’s a scaleable contination-based web framework written in Portable Smalltalk (ports easily to the four big Smalltalk players).
If you are doing something with a very rich interface, something that has to keep track of DOM ids, then doing this in RoR with RJS is a real PITA. Wicket (and other component-oriented approaches) take the burden of keeping track of all of this.
But, I forgot to say, that isn’t to denigrate RoR, it certainly has a place at the table - the simple CRUD application. You can’t beat RoR for this (but, then again, the simple CRUD app isn’t very interesting).