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Thursday August 18, 2005

Wicket is the most widely used Java Web Framework

According to this post, Wicket is the most widely used Java web framework. While I believe his statements are true, IMO it's only true in the context of this guy's post. My guess is that most of the folks that read his post were Wicket users, or somehow the Wicket Team got wind of this and told users to e-mail this guy. The main reason I don't believe that Wicket is the most popular is because it's so new. I do think it's an up and coming framework that may become the most popular, but I don't think it's there yet.

So, to answer this question, I believe that claiming Wicket to be the most widely is Just Good Guerilla PR. To put some numbers behind that, here's some graphs showing mailing list traffic for the various Java web frameworks.

Web Framework Mailing List Traffic - May/July 2005

Granted, these are just indicators of the number of users - but I believe they are a good indicator. One interesting note about these stats is that Wicket's mailing list traffic has increased significantly in the past few months. Ironically, here's what one of the Wicket developers had to say about this statistic about a month ago:

... who says having a lists that has a lot of traffic is a good thing? It might just as well be an indication of a too-hard-to-understand framework having insufficient documention.

In the past couple of months, I've spoke in front of 25+ Java developers on 4 different occasions to talk about web frameworks. I've asked those developers which frameworks they've used, or plan on using. Struts is still the most widely used, with WebWork and Tapestry the least used. Surprisingly, JSF seemed to be getting no traction among the the audiences I spoke to. Even more surprising (to me at least) was that the most popular web framework continues to be the in-house framework. The overwhelming majority of the developers I've talked to aren't even using open-source web frameworks.

Posted in Java at Aug 18 2005, 12:13:11 PM MDT 2 Comments
Comments:

I've used Java frameworks (JSF, Struts), JSPs, servlets and now Wicket and Wicket is by far and away the best because:- - you can build proper MVC logic in the most flexible way i.e. in a "proper" programming language without a whole heap of XML config and other distracting candy having to be incorporated - you end up with the browser presentation layer in HTML and the rest in a single, easy to understand, code base in one language only - there seem to be a huge number of nice UI components available for Wicket though one could say the same about other frameworks too - it's all open source and therefore free, with the usual support provisos - a Wicket can be deployed as a free standing WAR file into whatever servlet container you want with no other impact on anything else at all - if you've developed (as I have) a Java FSM model to control an application then that can be ported fairly simply to a web app using Wicket mainly because of the separation of concerns that Wicket provides, as above I have to say that I like it a lot and will be using it in the near future on one of my projects.

Posted by Rich Livingstone on June 29, 2006 at 04:09 PM MDT #

I think, wicket can be the most popular web framework, but as far as being widely used, that is just impossible.
It's not that wicket is not a good concept, its just that nobody is writing enough good tutorials. Or nobody is writing good books. I read the Pro Wicket book, and its really outdated.
Like Spring and Hibernate, to become widely used, wicket should invest in creating documentation.

Posted by Ice on November 18, 2007 at 01:32 PM MST #

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