I honestly will have to play with it a bit more. I was originally
interested in simply using Grails for its GORM back end. Eliminating all
the make work of data access, having the power of hibernate, its caching and
clustering capabilities with almost no upfront cost is appealing. Also,
there's the components that Grails integrates with, including Compass,
Quartz, even OpenLaslo. One can integrate these in a standard servlet
environment through time and effort, but Grails just makes it as simple as
the execution of a script.
There was the idea of remaking Wicket in Groovy, ala a Wicket Builder, but I
think after discussion that it was clear that that would be a effort of
folly. A code base like Wicket is simply too dynamic to attempt
equivalence. What would emerge is something that looked like Wicket,
perhaps encapsulated it's basic features and functionality, but it would not
be Wicket. At least, IMHO, there's not enough development interest to keep
a Groovy version synched.
But if Grails is able to take stock Java Wicket components, and weave them
into a presentation layer, then what you have is really the best of both
worlds. Like Eelco has said, you could start out the project using the RAD
elements of the framework to get something up and running quickly,
leveraging GORM for persistence. But after a while, more stabilized
development could be conducted in Java. My guess is that GORM could satisfy
80 - 90% of middle tier needs for projects, and would stand up to most
scalability concerns. Pepsi is one of the first customers to go live with
the project on a highly visible site.
I'll know more as soon as I've logged a few hours playing with the idea,
which starts tonight. If anyone else decides to take up the quest (ewww,
bad pun), please let me know so efforts can be coordinated.
-jjk
On 5/17/07, Eelco Hillenius <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> What is in Grails that would make Wicket "better" for web-app
development?
> Is it just the integration of Groovy or is there something more for a
Wicket
> user?
My uneducated take on this (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just thinking
out loud): something like Grails should work very well for when you
have to develop/ deliver quickly. Wicket works very well for when you
want to build projects that are maintainable, take advantage of reuse,
easily scale to larger teams etc. This plugin for Grails sounds like
the best of both worlds to me, at least if it is possible to have a
mixed development model. If it is possible to reuse custom components
in Grails (or Gricket) and if you can later switch pages (and
components?) that were build in Grails to 'normal' Wicket when you
want to, that would mean that you can work very rapidly at the start
of projects, and achieve a sort time-to-market, and later when it is
more important to work on robusteness, or e.g. digest custom
components to avoid code duplication etc, switch (parts) to a Wicket
model. Or use Cricket for one project and old-skool Wicket for the
other and still be able to reuse parts/ knowledge between the
projects.
Graeme, Julian, great you've been working on this! Cheers,
Eelco
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