A Wicket Diary

We keep getting requests to support Ajax in the Wicket framework. Apparently, Ajax is HOT, and supporting it will be cool. But should a framework always cater to the latest fad and have it working? What if some alternative technology arrives (Direct Web Remoting), should we also support that? How will we be able to actually ship the framework? And should the framework support the latest and hottest, or should it provide the means and extension points, so that others can provide great support for their hottest and coolest thing in add-ons?

We want the support to be REALLY good. Not just an afterthought, not just something we slammed into our framework, but good if not perfect. Supporting Ajax means supporting Javascript, and for our 1.0 release, we don’t have that perfect, easy to use support. It is on the Wicket roadmap for 1.1 and we are going to put some real effort into that after we ship 1.0 and that will be in the coming weeks as we squash our bugs.

Just as the Ruby on Rails guys, I’m all for creating native support for Javascript in Wicket, and provide the ajax support as an add-on.

Finally the long anticipated meeting of the minds for the Wicket project is taking place. Jonathan, Juergen, Chris, Eelco, Johan, Jan and me are currently at the Topicus office discussing a new implementation for a ListView, clustering, documentation and other stuff important for Wicket.

My employer, Topicus, was kind enough to provide funds to allow the core developers to meet in Deventer and have our international guests stay in a nice hotel in the center of town.

It is really nice to finally meet al the guys working on your open source project. Now we can put faces to the messages on the mailinglists.