- front page of website should feature 8 prominently
- prepare a press release with the Foundation
- have a really great announcement to give to the world about all the benefits of Wicket 8
Not blocking but really important:
- have a story to answer "Why not just use XXX.js?"
- have a story to answer "Isn't Java Server Side frameworks dead?"
- have a story to answer "Isn't Java dead"
Other things to consider:
- prepare some articles to publish to dzone, voxxed, etc...
7 Comments
Andrea Del Bene
Not blocking but really important:
- have a story to answer "Why not just use XXX.js?"
Despite their popularity, JavaScript frameworks are subject to a quite chaotic and uncertain life-cycle. New "revolutionary" frameworks pop up almost every year, usurping the throne to the "previosly-ultimate" framework. It's really impressive how fast JavaScript frameworks come into and fall out of fashion. To a lesser extent the same dynamic can be seen even for the language itself, with an increasing number of languages (Dart, CoffeScript, TypeSCript, etc...) that have been proposed as an alternative to "Vanilla JavaScript".
Another notable concern about JavaScript is the fragility of the development stack. Take for example a cornerstone component like NPM. Recently it has proved to have a major security vulnerability (https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/01/npm-incident-spam-vulnerability) and its Jenga-style dependency management has proved to be very weak as well (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/).
On the other hand Wicket has been proved in time being almost 14 years old and is here to stay. With Wicket you are not you are not bound to the fast change rate of JavaScript environment and you can use just the amount of JavaScript that you need in your application.
- have a story to answer "Isn't Java Server Side frameworks dead?"
Not at all. Java is universally recognized as a stable and reliable server side technology. It offers mature solutions like Maven to manage to your project and you can use stable libraries which don't risk to be deprecated from one day to another. Web frameworks based on java are no exception to these rules. The adoption of Java 8 and its main features (especially lambdas and streams) have made the language suited for developing simple and intuitive web frameworks like Spark and Vertx. Now with this new main version also Wicket benefits from Java 8 features and can be used as well to implement web applications and microservices with expressive and maintainable code.
Another selling point for Java is its the ability to mitigate the "JavaScript fatigue" with tools like Maven Frontend Plugin which allows to use locally any given combination of the most popular JavaScript tools (Bower, Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, etc..)
- have a story to answer "Isn't Java dead"
...
Martin Tzvetanov Grigorov
CEO most probably do not care about the web framework
I guess you meant SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - but this is not strong feature in Wicket
Andrea Del Bene
oops!!
Martin Tzvetanov Grigorov
Navigation history - actually any modern JS framework is much better than Wicket in managing the navigation history (aka routes). Wicket doesn't help at all for Ajax requests.
Martin Tzvetanov Grigorov
Testing support: this is also very easy in most modern JS frameworks. One extra benefit is that you can run your (unit) tests in a real headless browser. And it is quite fast too!
Martin Tzvetanov Grigorov
I agree that the tooling in JS world is worse than in JVM!
`rm -rf node_modules && npm install` is very annoying!
Martin Tzvetanov Grigorov
A colleague of mine likes to say "All JS frameworks are effectively deprecated". That is, when you start a project and pick a JS framework for the frontend it might be the latest hype at the moment but by the time you have to deliver another N newer/better/faster/... JS frameworks have appeared and your choice might not be even supported anymore.
A strong point for Wicket is that it is proven in time and here to stay!