I used Wicket quite extensively about 10 years ago so my comments may not be true anymore. I began using Wicket as it was so much better than Struts and JSF. However, the development of new custom widgets in Wicket was so much more convoluted than implementing the same widget in Backbone.js. And it was hard to inject new functionality into and existing page. I eventually refactored all my UI code into jquery+ backbone.js ( this was before React ) and that code is in production and still working. And the new developers maintaining it don't see any reason to refactor that into React or Vue.
> However, the development of new custom widgets in Wicket was so much more convoluted than implementing the same widget in Backbone.js.
Hmm, I found developing custom widgets was a joy, though the key was to keep them very small and compositional - e.g. if you want a user details widget with an address entry, it's probably best to make that address widget its own smaller widget that the user details widget just uses - and aligned with your model hierarchy. Often you end up with a parallel hierarchy where e.g. you have a user model that contains an address and phone number, so you've got a user display widget whose model is that user object and in that there's an address display widget whose model is the address field of that user object (and similarly for your edit widgets).
I tried to look up examples of what doing the same thing in Backbone.js looks like, but the search results don't seem to be about making custom widgets as I understand it. To be fair I'm struggling to find examples in Wicket as well. But I'd be interested to hear what it does better.
> And it was hard to inject new functionality into and existing page.
Hmm, what kind of functionality do you mean? I will say that again making pages very compositional was key - my team settled on a pattern where most of our pages were just a single top-level panel (so you could always reuse or embed a whole page if you wanted to) and then most panels were made of a handful of smaller panels, similar to the clean code style where you try to make each function only call three or four other functions. And then it was easy to change whatever we needed because the code structure corresponded directly to the logical business/model structure and the inheritance structure corresponded to the visual structure (e.g. we had an abstract class for what an "editing panel" looks like and all our editing panels inherited from that. So if you want to add a new field to the user model, you add it in the user model and the user display panel and user edit panel are right next to that. And if you want to change the visual design of all our editing panels, you change that in the parent component and it will apply to all of them).
