Cleanly Designed Wicket Sites That Scale
I’ll start this post off with a quote from IRC
ivaynberg: you cant build good looking sites with wicket
victori: lies
ivaynberg: or public-facing sites
I have to admit that Wicket appeals more to the “backend” programmer than to the front-end design conscious developer. For every good-looking Wicket site out there, there are ten abysmal looking Wicket sites. Just look at the Wicket Wiki, it is littered with some dreadfully designed sites (Sorry Guys, this isn’t personal). You can tell right off the bat that the developers behind the sites care more about OO and clean code rather than clean design. Well to be frank, I don’t even know if the code behind the listed sites is even elegant. However, the fact that the sites are written on Wicket, tells me that the developers care about things such as separation of concerns and object oriented programming.
So to combat against the whole mentality that Wicket can’t scale and any site done in Wicket must look atrocious. I have decided to compile a list of some awesomely kick ass public-facing / good-looking Wicket sites.
If you don’t see your site and you feel that it should have made the list, feel free to leave a comment with your site’s URL.
High Traffic Wicket Sites
adscale.de
This site has an Alexa 1,700 traffic rank and runs on a single Tomcat servlet container. No proxy caches, no fancy clustering just Tomcat.
vegas.com
Next time someone states that no public facing sites are ever written in wicket, point them to vegas.com.
Clean Wicket Sites
kontain.com
The design behind this site is quite good and sets the design bar in my book.
meetmoi.com
Ah, I remember when the developer behind meetmoi dropped by #wicket and stated that he is officially working on it full time with a million dollars in venture capital seed money.
songtexte.com
Don’t know much about this site, aside that it looks clean and the author did the original b-side wicket site that got replaced with wordpress.
memolio.com
fabulously40.com
Disclaimer: this is the site I developed and I think it looks good 😉
winerevolution.com
islamicdesignhouse.com
For the moment let’s say there are two types of development teams: those that think of their mission in terms of building a great looking website and those that concentrate on building a well crafted webapp. The former have good visual design skills and spend a lot of time thinking about the user experience. The latter know a lot about writing clean code that leads to robust, extensible systems. [And the sun is always shining…]
To the extent my portrayal of the two camps is real, wicket appeals to the latter group. It is truly a smart framework and *can* facilitate well written webapps. I am in the backend wicket camp and I have contributed to more than my share of horrid looking websites. I tend to end up on projects requiring deep technical resumes, projects where the visual, experiential side is given little priority.
Wish I had better visual skills though…
Thanks for the great post.
I’m a website developer and I work more with code then design. But I still have to admit that writing clean code just aren’t help much for the world wide web. Design and user experience, usability is way more important.
I think a beautiful website isn’t depend on what framework you use. It depends on how you design the website. So when your friend said, you can’t build a good looking website with wicket is just wrong. He could say you can’t build a beautiful website with Paint, than that maybe right(some designers still could pull it off though).
It’s quite a good collection though 🙂
I think, wicket attracts more java developer with no web experience. But wicket comes without a default theme, so any application looks like web 1.0 🙂
As i noticed here: http://www.wicket-praxis.de/blog/2009/11/03/wicket-theme-css-layout-fur-wicket-anwendungen/ wicket needs a default theme.
If I may be so bold to promote I site I build: http://www.tipspot.com fits nicely in the category Clean Wicket Sites.
Event though my blog tells everyone how much I hate the fact that Wicket is codeheavy, I am actually deeply in love with the fact that I can make a full blown functional website and just hand out my wicket template files to a designer that can make my website shine. In this respect nothing surpasses Wicket. Especially since I am an educated Java developer, I tend to leave the CSS to the bare minimum 😉
Glasscubes – Share, Collaborate, Communicate (i.e. yet another CRM).
http://www.glasscubes.com/ (sign up for Basic account and login to see that the site is Wicket-powered)
ties.com
Not the “cleanest” site on the planet, but it’s powered by Wicket.
Ivaynberg is a key commiter on Wicket isn’t he?
What was the context of the quote at the top? Are you sure it wasn’t sarcasm? 😀
“ivaynberg: you cant build good looking sites with wicket”
http://www.springer.com
Good looking is not the scope of Wicket, but with Wicket you can easily adopt any design.
Wicket still sucks