The trouble with Generics

This document tries to capture the benefits and doubts we have regarding generics in Wicket 1.4. Ultimately we need to find a way where the Framework and Wicket Community can move onward to Wicket 1.5/2.0 with Java 5 as a basis.

Generics Rock!

Java generics are good for type safety throughout your code. They document the code directly with intent: List<Person> leaves little to the imagination as to what goes into the list.

These benefits are a great asset to Wicket. Wicket uses the concept of models to provide components with the data that needs to be rendered. Until recently Wicket was Java 1.4 based, and a lot of components suffered from the lack of generified models. Take for instance the ListView:

Generics Suck!