A while ago, I did some testing with Adobe Flex. Flex is a component-based framework. Basically you create a webpage and put a bunch of Flex-components on it. I know, oversimplified, but you get the point.
When I started at my current employer, I made a career-switch and wanted to develop in Java. I had a lot of desktop programming experience, some (non-professional) web-development experience, and thought that would be enough to make the switch to Java.
Almost 2 years have passed, and still I can’t develop JSF (we’re an Oracle-company, so ADF-Faces, but the concept is the same) applications. I tried a couple of times. I know how the concept works. But what I could create in Flex in about 10 or 20 minutes, I still cannot create with the tools I’m supposed to use professionally. Since I don’t qualify myself as utterly stupid, Flex must be doing something right.
Correct. Flex is component-based. If you need more functionality, you extend an object, and use it in your application. The reason I like that, is because that’s the way I used to develop desktop applications. An IDE like Visual Studio or Delphi works the same.
But Flex is not Java. Coldfusion in a way is, but I need to run my software in an Java-environment where Coldfusion would be something extra (think: more expenses).
Wicket is a component based web framework. Basically you create an HTML page, put some Wicket components on it, create and/or fill-in the backend Java-classes (POJO’s!) to define the behavior of the components and basically that’s it. Create a WAR, deploy to the application server, and run. Sounds simple? It is! I just ran a very simple test with Netbeans 6 beta 1 and Glassfish V2 and the Wicket page shows what I just created. Wickedt!