Apache Wicket
November 14, 2007
Wicket
I envisioned and originated Apache Wicket in March, 2004. Wicket was designed to be a category-busting component framework for developing web applications. With the help of a large, global team of Open Source developers, Wicket has grown and flourished and is well on the way to the way to achieving that goal now.
The Framework
Wicket is a comprehensive, mature product and is being used by startups (Thoof, MeetMoi, Joost, Sell@Market, GenieTown, B-Side), mid-sized companies (Vegas.com, LeapFrog, Topicus, Servoy, TeachScape, Componence, Hippo) and large companies (IBM, Amazon, Tom-Tom, Nikon, Verisign, and others) to develop and maintain fast, complex, scalable web applications.
The Core Team
The core Wicket team is active and global. We currently have 16 active core committers, 3 retired core developers and around 50 additional contributors. Most contributors to Wicket are senior level developers and many are contributors to other Open Source projects.
Support
There are currently two books on Wicket and a third to be published shortly. There are Wicket User’s Groups in various countries and a number of Wicket presentations have been given at conferences globally. The wicket-user mailing list and the ##wicket IRC channel provide quick answers and deep technical support for the framework.
A Large and Growing Community
The Wicket community is also active and global. The Wicket mailing lists are among the most heavily trafficked lists in the Java space. As of September 4, 2008, Nabble lists wicket-user (which has more than 500 members) as the 2nd most active mailing list in the Java Software category, ahead of even Sun’s Netbeans. In the Web Development Frameworks category, it is currently number one, ahead of even Ruby on Rails (and by a very wide margin).
SourceForge.net Wicket traffic 2004-2007
Press and User Feedback
Press and online coverage of Wicket has been positive and seems to be increasing. Recently, LeapFrog made public its success story with Wicket in eWeek Magazine. The movers and shakers of the Open Source world concur with this finding. Wicket was covered at JavaPolis in Europe. RJ Lorimer wrote a series of articles about Wicket for JavaLobby. Wicket has been covered on DevX. Nick Heudecker (author of Hibernate Quickly) has expressed his feelings about Wicket on TheServerSide. And ordinary day-today users blog about Wicket again and again and again and again. And of course the quotes we get from our users are nothing short of glowing.
