Wicket, a lightweight, component-oriented web application framework in plain Java and XHTML, stresses separation of concerns, testability, and good object-oriented design practices. Check out Wicket's approach to common implementation scenarios.
by Daniel Carleton
October 12, 2007
he web application frameworks available today offer a wealth of development styles. Well-known web development technologies such as JavaServer Faces, ASP.NET, and the Google Web Toolkit use event-driven, component-oriented designs that resemble traditional GUI programming. This approach makes sense as web applications become more like desktop applications in sophistication and functionality all the time. However, many of these frameworks can be unwieldy, requiring heavy tool support and having steep learning curves. Also, the mingling of code and markup often challenges testability, refactoring, and separation of concerns. A Java web application framework called Wicket takes a lightweight approach to the component-oriented model to overcome these and other challenges.
At its core, Wicket is a Java framework for processing markup. It represents web applications, each page in them, and each component on each page as classes. Wicket then uses a simple naming convention to associate the classes responsible for dynamically manipulating markup with HTML files via the classpath. These files are truly just plain HTML—validating documents devoid of JavaServer Pages (JSP)-style "tag soup," and freely editable by designers. (Sidebar 1 explains how Wicket completely avoids control structures in markup.)
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he web application frameworks available today offer a wealth of development styles. Well-known web development technologies such as JavaServer Faces, 
