Not so long ago people complained about writing web applications being boring, not fun, or cumbersome. Though there is enough to complain about the Swing API (at least according to those that complain), it is generally considered to be a well thought out API.

So it is especially noteworthy when someone returns to Swing programming and longs for his web framework API. Ryan Sonnek writes:

I do miss Wicket quite a bit though. There are a lot of similarities between Wicket and Swing, but I think the Wicket API is much nicer.

In my opinion the message here is not that Swing has a bad API, or Wicket's API is much better (this is merely the opinion of one coder), but rather that web development has come a long way, at least when you use Wicket.