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 		<div id="contentbody">
 			<h1>The Wicket Vision</h1>
 			<p>Designing and implementing any framework for use in the real world inevitably
 involves compromises and some degree of complexity, and Wicket is no
 exception. However, I believe you will find that Wicket is quite compact,
 focused and powerful as a framework. If Wicket has these characteristics, it
 is because it was designed to solve one very specific problem well:</p>

 <blockquote>
   <p>enabling component-oriented, programmatic manipulation of markup</p>
 </blockquote>

 <p>Wicket does this and very little else, and that is a good thing.</p>

 <p>I once heard Josh Bloch talk about the power to weight ratio of an API. The
 highest compliment anyone could make of Wicket would be to suggest that
 Wicket has a lot of power and not much conceptual surface area.</p>

 <p>In art, negative space is the part that’s not the subject. In music, negative
 space is the rest. In software, negative space is all the code that you
 managed to avoid writing. In all three disciplines, it’s what separates what
 is truly excellent from what is merely good.</p>

 <p>Following this metaphor, if Wicket is our foreground object, it is defined in
 a negative sense by all the things that it is not (by the background).</p>

 <p>In other words, ideally, Wicket is a web UI framework that delegates as many
 areas of responsibility as possible to other, more focused tools and
 techniques. It recognizes that Hibernate is good at persistence; that Spring is
 good at DI; that Java properties files are good for
 localization; that sub-classing is good for creating component types; that
 Dreamweaver is good at doing HTML layout; that Beans are good for structuring
 properties; and so on.</p>

 <p>The more ways that Wicket can find to offload responsibilities (both now and
 in the future), the less it will be. And thus, the more it will be.</p>

 <p>The difficulty moving forward with Wicket will be balancing all the
 day-to-day needs people are going to be bringing up with this overall vision
 of minimalism. There ultimately will be compromises, and the “trick” to
 making the right compromises is simply to agonize over all the options for a
 long time and then to only make the compromises that everyone agrees are
 really essential to what Wicket needs to be and do.</p>

 <p>A big part of this process of agonizing is to act like doctors and “first, do
 no harm”. If some issue isn’t sitting well with everyone yet, there’s
 probably a reason for that. So, maybe the near-term solution is to simply do
 nothing and let people use the existing functionality until the limits to
 that approach (as well as competing ideas) are better understood.</p>

 <p>It’s easy to add features. It’s often impossible to change or remove them.</p>

 <p>Given this, the Wicket approach to the overall problem of evolving while
 keeping a high power to weight ratio will be partitioning off all
 controversial new ideas in a “wicket-stuff” package until they are broadly
 accepted. This way people can experiment and code away and check in lots of
 stuff without affecting the main codebase with untested ideas. Then, when
 ideas pan out to everyone’s satisfaction, the leads of the
 project will move them into the core.</p>

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	<div id="contentbody">
	<h1>The Wicket Vision</h1>
	<p>Designing and implementing any framework for use in the real world inevitably
	involves compromises and some degree of complexity, and Wicket is no
	exception. However, I believe you will find that Wicket is quite compact,
	focused and powerful as a framework. If Wicket has these characteristics, it
	is because it was designed to solve one very specific problem well:</p>

	<blockquote>
	<p>enabling component-oriented, programmatic manipulation of markup</p>
	</blockquote>

	<p>Wicket does this and very little else, and that is a good thing.</p>

	<p>I once heard Josh Bloch talk about the power to weight ratio of an API. The
	highest compliment anyone could make of Wicket would be to suggest that
	Wicket has a lot of power and not much conceptual surface area.</p>

	<p>In art, negative space is the part that’s not the subject. In music, negative
	space is the rest. In software, negative space is all the code that you
	managed to avoid writing. In all three disciplines, it’s what separates what
	is truly excellent from what is merely good.</p>

	<p>Following this metaphor, if Wicket is our foreground object, it is defined in
	a negative sense by all the things that it is not (by the background).</p>

	<p>In other words, ideally, Wicket is a web UI framework that delegates as many
	areas of responsibility as possible to other, more focused tools and
	techniques. It recognizes that Hibernate is good at persistence; that Spring is
	good at DI; that Java properties files are good for
	localization; that sub-classing is good for creating component types; that
	Dreamweaver is good at doing HTML layout; that Beans are good for structuring
	properties; and so on.</p>

	<p>The more ways that Wicket can find to offload responsibilities (both now and
	in the future), the less it will be. And thus, the more it will be.</p>

	<p>The difficulty moving forward with Wicket will be balancing all the
	day-to-day needs people are going to be bringing up with this overall vision
	of minimalism. There ultimately will be compromises, and the “trick” to
	making the right compromises is simply to agonize over all the options for a
	long time and then to only make the compromises that everyone agrees are
	really essential to what Wicket needs to be and do.</p>

	<p>A big part of this process of agonizing is to act like doctors and “first, do
	no harm”. If some issue isn’t sitting well with everyone yet, there’s
	probably a reason for that. So, maybe the near-term solution is to simply do
	nothing and let people use the existing functionality until the limits to
	that approach (as well as competing ideas) are better understood.</p>

	<p>It’s easy to add features. It’s often impossible to change or remove them.</p>

	<p>Given this, the Wicket approach to the overall problem of evolving while
	keeping a high power to weight ratio will be partitioning off all
	controversial new ideas in a “wicket-stuff” package until they are broadly
	accepted. This way people can experiment and code away and check in lots of
	stuff without affecting the main codebase with untested ideas. Then, when
	ideas pan out to everyone’s satisfaction, the leads of the
	project will move them into the core.</p>

	</div>
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	Copyright © 2015 — The Apache Software Foundation. Apache Wicket,
	Wicket, Apache, the Apache feather logo, and the Apache Wicket project logo
	are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other marks mentioned
	may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
	</span></div>

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