Apache Wicket vs Apache Click
What is the difference between Apache Wicket and Apache Click? Is Apache Click maintained? The latest release seems to be from Nov 2008 Thanks Achilleas
Answer
Click is actively developed and has recently graduated as an Apache Top Level Project. It is currently moving to its new domain at: http://click.apache.org. Once the migration is complete the next version, 2.1.0, will be released.
Before comparing Click and Wicket do note that I am a committer at Apache Click but have evaluated Wicket a couple of years ago so have a fairly good idea of how it works.
Click is a stateless framework while Wicket is stateful. In Click, pages and components are recreated each request, in Wicket the pages and components are stored in the session and reused in subsequent requests.
Wicket is meant for building complex applications (think desktop), where all the GUI state is stored and managed for you. Click is meant for the more traditional web applications where little to no state is necessary to render a page. If you need to store state you have to manage it yourself by adding/removing it from the session. Its worth mentioning that Wicket provides support for stateless pages and Click supports stateful pages, however this isn't the norm for these frameworks.
Another difference is that in Click controls knows how to render themselves, so you don't have to repeat the markup in your page templates. You can still manually layout your templates if you want, but it is not strictly necessary. In Wicket the markup needs to reflect the components created in the page. The idea in Wicket is that the Java developer doesn't actually create or maintain the templates, instead this is handled by a designer.
kind regards
Bob