First I must admit that I don't buy GWT's approach. There is a reason why we don't write HTML code from servlets anymore. Programmers usually are bad UI designers (look at my website for something to back my claim ;-) and great UI designers usually don't
I have been using Wicket for a while now and I’ve occasionally wondered if GWT provides any kind of advantage over Wicket. Here is a comparison and instead of coding a simple “Hello World” kind of example, here is something a little more complex. Functionality The target functionality is a one-page application that shows data in a single table. Item counts are displayed categorized under multiple “spaces” (workspaces). There is a summary row. The user can click on a space to expand the count of items grouped by status. Some of the tricky parts are: * The number and names of the possible status types can be different for different spaces. * Some of the table cells have to be merged to represent the grouping by space and then by status. * the style / color of the different cells has to be controlled to differentiate the total count from that grouped by status. Let's look at the Java code common to the GWT and Wicket implementations.