Greg, Basically wicket creates a session for every user and then attaches a java object graph to that session, with parts shared between sessions. Then there are some mechanisms for attaching "id"-ed objects in that graph to "id"-ed elements in an HTML template, and rendering directions for the "merge" between the template and the object graph. Basically you have java developers pretending the web is like swing (eg stateful UI), web designers designing the "fluff" around the "active UI" bits, and then various kinds of magic in the middle to make that work.
Why, one might even say its a little bit like the google web toolkit, except its also a little bit more "full stack" like ruby on rails, and fully open source. The template language made me think of kid (you know the python one), only its a lot simpler and doesn't allow embedding of source code. Or like .net web development without ASP and visual basic. Of course, once you have a java object graph with all your data in it, using some kind of object persistence thing (probably using OR mapping) is the next step towards not having to think about the web and just doing java development. Wicket goes quite far that way; you don't even need to know how to write XML files or even valid XHTML in order to use it. And making things "AJAX" is all but transparent (since the request/response is hidden, making it into another kind of request/response is not so difficult). Its uber cool if you want to make java developers build web applications quickly. Its not so cool if you want to use XSLT or similar stuff (use cocoon), process 100s of megabytes of XML documents (use cocoon), or want some kind of java-ish programming model which still keeps request/response somewhere in there (use struts or a similar action-based framework), or want efficient memory use scaling up to 1000s of concurrent users (in which case, don't put any state in java objects and don't use any framework like any of these, in fact, anything servlet-based kinda sucks automatically). The project at the ASF that comes closest is tapestry, but I haven't ever fully understood what tapestry actually is (I know it builds on hivemind which is somewhat like excalibur/avalon/osgi automatically making it different from wicket since wicket is not "IOC"), so I can't comment further. Wicket *is* different. Whether this is the right way to do things is debatable, but I would say now is not the right time for the incubator to start having those kinds of debates. Various ASF members like working this way, are working this way, and are backing this proposal. Trust darwinism. LSD --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
