Question

For a new project I want to usa a component-based framework (thinking of Wicket or Tapestry). It’s an intranet-application, but i have to provide Restful Webservices aswell.

After googling around i havent found any good solution, that describes how to integrate Wicket with any Jax-RS compliant library.

Has anybody done this before?

I already saw, that Wicket CAN provide rest-like URLs, but i would to switch between fully-fledged Wicket-Gui and webservice by accept-header.

Everything i found, suggests, creating a different vhost/url-route.

If you say, tapestry (or any other framework) is much better, for what i wanna do, let me know. But somehow i like wicket.

Answer 1

I’d recommend using Spring “contract first” web services or REST:

http://static.springsource.org/spring-ws/site/
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/wa-spring3webserv/index.html

Especially if you’re interested in frameworks. Spring is much more than a web MVC framework. It gives you:

1. Dependency injection
2. Aspect oriented programming
3. Rock solid modules for web MVC, persistence, remoting, messaging, security, web services, etc.

I’m not sure why you think a component based approach is superior, but it seems to me that it’s been left in the dust by HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery. I’d reconsider the requirement.

The implementation of the web service should not know or care at all about what technology is used to implement the client. That’s the beauty of web services: if done properly, they can survive longer. UIs can come and go, but the business logic and fundamentals in the services can remain. They can deal with UIs running on desktops, browsers, mobile, and maybe even Google’s heads-up display. We’ll see.