Difference between Apache Tapestry and Apache Wicket

Stephan_Schmidt_75577 0
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Apache Wicket ( http://wicket.apache.org/ ) and Apache Tapestry ( http://wicket.apache.org/ ) are both component oriented web frameworks - contrary to action based frameworks like Stripes - by the Apache Foundation. Both allow you to build your application from components in Java. They both look very similar to me.

What are the differences between those two frameworks? Has someone experience in both? Specifically:

  • How is their performance, how much can state handling be customized, can they be used stateless?
  • What is the difference in their component model?
  • What would you choose for which applications?
  • How do they integrate with Guice, Spring, JSR 299?

Edit: I have read the documentation for both and I have used both. The questions cannot be answered sufficently from reading the documentation, but from the experience from using these for some time, e.g. how to use Wicket in a stateless mode for high performance sites. Thanks.

tapestry web-frameworks wicket java
8 Answers

REVISED after studying Tapestry 5.

Wicket's goal is an attempt to make web development similar to desktop GUI one. They managed to do it really well at the expense of memory usage ( HTTPSession ).

Tapestry 5's goal is to make very optimized (for CPU and memory) component oriented web framework.

The really big pitfall for me was responses "Wicket supports stateless component!" to the arguments "Wicket is memory hungry". While Wicket indeed supports stateless components they are not "a focus of Wicket development". For example a bug in StatelessForm was not fixed for a very long time - see StatelessForm - problem with parameters after validation fails.

  • IMHO using Wicket is a bit eaiser until you are going to optimize/ fine-tune web application parameters
  • IMHO Wicket is harder to study if you have programmed web applications and want to think in terms of request processing
  • Tapestry 5 automatically reloads component classes as soon as you change them. Both frameworks reload component markup.
  • Wicket forces markup/ code separation, Tapestry 5 just give you this ability. You can also use less verbose syntax in Tapestry 5. As always this freedom requires more cautions to be taken.
  • Wicket's core is easier to debug: user components are based on inheritance while Tapestry 5 user components are based on annotations. From the other side that could make transitions to the future versions easier for Tapestry then for Wicket.

Unfortunately Tapestry 5 tutorial does not stress that Tapestry code example like 't:loop source="1..10"...' can be a bad practice. So some effort should be put into writing Tapestry usage conventions/ good practices if your team is not very small.

My recommendations:

  • Use Wicket when your pages structure is very dynamic and you can afford spending 10-200 Kbs of HttpSession memory per user (these are rough numbers).
  • Use Tapestry 5 in cases when you need more efficient usage of resources
user_293630
user_16894160

I think Wicket is a simpler framework to use.

Also, Wicket does allow for class reloading via your IDE's hot-code replace system. This is all that is required for Wicket to run off modified versions of a currently running application's classes. The usual restrictions apply for hot-code replace, such as having to run in Debug mode (Eclipse) and not being able to change structural aspects of a class (i.e. class name, changing method signatures etc...).

user_1057410
user_2381340

Wicket is very good web framework. Best from all what i'm know. I'm use it since version 1.3 and always get what i'm want. Wicket has excellent integration with Spring - just use @SpringBean annotation in you code to inject any spring bean to your classes.

user_812520
user_2521090
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