Wicket vs. Tapestry4

Posted on August 26, 2005  •  1 minutes  • 171 words

Last couple of days I’ve been tossed between Tapestry 4b3 and Wicket 1.1b3. Both of which integration with Spring is quite problematic.

Things I like about Tapestry(4):

• Full control over pages/components
• Once Spring is integrated, full IOC is possible.
• Nice components available (eg. Tacos)

Things I don’t like about Tapestry:

• Quite a lot of dependencies (Here less is beter)
• Hivemind.. (way to beta to do some actual work). Try integrating it with hibernate for example..
• Directory structure. HTML pages float around in the classpath without the possibility to have them

But comparing them with Wicket…

Good things:

• Strongly typed
• Real components (class+html) possible (just drag a jar in the lib folder)
• Good I18n possibilities
• Good templating possibilities (both HTML and class)
• very few dependencies
• Spring can be integrated by encapsulating it in the Application class

Things I don’t like about Wicket

• Everything needs to be defined in java, no pull possible
• Getting the HTML right is hell, tags aren’t replaced they are filled
• Components require the right tags
• No real IOC