A Wicket Diary

In my quest for more feedback on the Web Framework Smackdown, I’ve found this blog entry. I don’t agree with the author that it was too nice. In my opinion the idea was to convince people to leave the current MVC or JSP/servlet paradigm behind and create stateful, rich web applications using the component based frameworks of today. And they succeeded more or less.

Having each speaker jack hammering the other’s brains out with statements like ‘Mine is smaller than yours’ (lines of code, that is), or in the case of JSF ‘Mine is bigger than yours’ (XML files) wouldn’t have helped the discussion.

The general sentiment of the panel was: move to component based development or be left behind. Like David Geary said:

“Struts is old school, get over it”

Here’s a photo of the contenders in the Smackdown.

How often do you have both JSF guru Ed Burns and Tapestry founder Howard Lewis Ship advertising for Wicket? If you haven’t been to the smackdown, you didn’t only miss this remarkable feat, but also a highly amuzing, fun and entertaining panel discussion. This was majorly different from the coma inducing portlet vendor expert panel and I’m glad that Ed Burn’s concerns for the smackdown didn’t come into being.

It was really great to see these five guys stabbing one another below the belt whenever possible and making minced meat from the MVC frameworks (’Struts is Dead, move on’, Dave Geary). So if you have been to the smackdown and you want to comment on it, do so here, or on the discussion on the JavaLobby.