Wicket RAD and Metawidget

[kennardconsulting]

Hi there,

Congratulations on Wicket RAD - it looks very cool.

Looking at your documentation, it seems your direction is very much in line with my own project Metawidget (http://www.metawidget.org). Perhaps before we both get too far down the track duplicating each other's efforts we should see if we can't benefit each other :)

Metawidget's focus is a little different to Wicket RADs: it does not go as 'deep' into the CRUD stack, but equally it is broader across UI frameworks. At present it does not support Wicket, but it DOES support JPA, Hibernate Validator, JavaBeans etc. etc.

You may also be interested in its pluggable Layout support for rendering forms.

Perhaps a good marriage would be for Wicket RAD to focus on the 'deep' CRUD work, and use Metawidget to render the form itself? This would require building a WicketMetawidget similar to the existing StrutsMetawidget, SpringMetawidget, FacesMetawidget, HtmlMetawidget etc. etc.

I would be most interested in your thoughts.

Regards,

Richard.

[wfaler]

Hi,
Haven't seen your framework, but I'll definitely have a look this weekend.

I agree duplication should be avoided, although one of the goals of Wicket RAD is to provide utilities for Wicket, so I'm not sure the front-end work will go away (as far as the CRUD goes, I'm a little out of ideas at the moment, so I think actually the Wicket frontend bits will see the most development in the short-term - more flexible layouts etc, there are already hooks in to transparently add Ajaxy behaviour through Wickets "Behavior" concept, although this is somewhat undocumented at the moment).

One way though, could be to work on interoperability between our projects - "Wicketize" parts of metawidget to allow it to hook into Wicket for those who prefer that (maybe create an adapter/plugin whereever it makes sense between the two?), and maybe leverage the CRUD parts of Wicket RAD for metawidget where it makes sense?

I'll have to read up on what your framework does more exactly to get better, more accurate ideas, but it's definitely worth looking at different options and avenues.

kennardconsulting wrote:

Hi there,

Congratulations on Wicket RAD - it looks very cool.

Looking at your documentation, it seems your direction is very much in line with my own project Metawidget (http://www.metawidget.org). Perhaps before we both get too far down the track duplicating each other's efforts we should see if we can't benefit each other :)

Metawidget's focus is a little different to Wicket RADs: it does not go as 'deep' into the CRUD stack, but equally it is broader across UI frameworks. At present it does not support Wicket, but it DOES support JPA, Hibernate Validator, JavaBeans etc. etc.

You may also be interested in its pluggable Layout support for rendering forms.

Perhaps a good marriage would be for Wicket RAD to focus on the 'deep' CRUD work, and use Metawidget to render the form itself? This would require building a WicketMetawidget similar to the existing StrutsMetawidget, SpringMetawidget, FacesMetawidget, HtmlMetawidget etc. etc.

I would be most interested in your thoughts.

Regards,

Richard.

[kennardconsulting]

Sounds good. I look forward to hearing how you go. If I may suggest a course of reading:

1. Understand that Metawidget isn't a 'framework' or anything as grand as that. It's just a widget.
2. Follow the tutorial parts 1 and 2. Part 2, in particular, is a web-based app
3. Notice the pluggable, 'flexible layouts' you mentioned
4. Slant your thinking towards developing a WicketMetawidget. All of the existing Metawidgets (for Swing, Spring, Struts, JSF and Android) share a common base (MetawidgetMixin) so extending your own for a particular framework is not too difficult.

Regards,

Richard.

[Ahmet Kilic]

It is really good news.  I hope "each other's efforts" will be better. I think you can get better work together.