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GWT and Wicket

Wicket and GWT are both component-oriented web application frameworks, but they take opposite approaches to state management. Wicket pages and sessions are composed and maintained entirely on the server, and a round trip takes place when effecting any significant changes to them. GWT pages, on the other hand, are composed of JavaScript widgets running on the client-side, where state is maintained and ongoing server communication occurs against a flat RPC layer.

Motivation

Why would you want to include GWT widget as components in your Wicket pages?

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Server round-trips can be heavy for implementing some types of client-side behavior. For example, what if you're tracking the coordinates of a mouse-over on an image. Doing a round-trip to check the mouse cursor location against some state on the server would be prohibitive. What if you could simply ship that Java code and associated state to the client?

Starting Point for Integration

I began designing an integration between Wicket and GWT, but never followed through to implementation. I concluded that including GWT in some kind of cohesive development environment with Wicket was taking too much work. This may improve with an incremental Eclipse builder for GWT.

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