Wicket – POJO web app development

In the current trend of reducing J2EE application development to the simplest possible form, Plain Ordinary Java Objects, POJOs, the Wicket project is aiming to allow Java developers to build web apps also using POJOs.

Wicket’s feature list is pretty impressive. The approach to development is that the HTML pages are just that, plain HTML, and the Java supporting the pages are POJOs.

From looking throght the examples though, there is still some package and super class hierarchy dependencies on the Wicket framework, so I wouldn’t say that the Java code is pure POJOs, but it does look a lot cleaner than Struts.

Killer Java Desktop App?

I didn’t know Limewire was still around (I had a look at it out of curiousity quite a while ago), but Hans Muller in his blog on the java.net site mentioned that this Java app is picking up a lot of momentum.

It’s currently up to 1.4 million downloads a month – thats a huge number for any app, but its a truely massive number for a Java application. Hans mentions that on download.com, it’s currently 3 times the downloads of WinZip, 10 times RealPlayer, and about 20 times Windows XP Service Pack 2.