Monthly Archive for February, 2010

What about Wicket?

Published on February 16, 2010 in Java. 0 Comments

I’m not an Expert. But I have worked with web frameworks in the last two years. During those years i have tried to find easier ways to do basic user interfaces. It has always been recoding this and reusing that. What if the world of web development could start being effective?

And then Wicket comes into the picture. It doesnt make the case any better. Actually, wicket is the rant for this article.

Wicket uses abstraction and inheritance to develop interfaces. Mostly like we do with Swing. But does it really make the cut?

With developing web applications as a daily job, boilerplate is always an issue. And with wicket that boilerplate issue increases. Yes i can make reusable components, but that doesnt advocate its use as an out of the box framework. Its very difficult to make a dropdown menu per example whereas in web flow this is just a template.

To conclude: wicket cant stand up to Spring Web Flow when it comes to speed of development. I can make a flow app from Pojo in about one hour that actually works. With wicket i have to code, compile, package and test. In flow i can just edit a flow definition or two.

I Think Ill keep on using Spring for my development.

Written 8:39 am by Jarl André Hübenthal

Spring Web Flow vs MVC

Published on February 12, 2010 in Java. 0 Comments Tags: , .

In the last two years ive tried to learn Spring. I wanted an easier approach to web development. It was too cumbersome to recreate the gui flow for each new project. So i decided to go into MVC. It was heaven compared to how i had it before. Simpler.

I couldnt really get the grasp on Web Flow at that point. It was only recently that i discovered how simple and easy this framework really is.

Web Flow is all about control. You will see all the nifty details and can make sure that the page you are managing has the required behaviour. And all defined in an XML file. And another thing; if i ever decide to use another framework my POJO service and domain classes wont be difficult to make use of.

Some advocate that Web Flow has poor binding support. That binding custom classes is not easy/possible. But I say that its a small matter compared to what I gain. Almost everything can be bound with strings and arrays.

I am creating a cms that is taking use of Web Flow, and its a breeze. No more extended controllers!

Written 7:46 am by Jarl André Hübenthal