In the last three months I’ve been learning a lot about the Java programming language. After ‘graduating’ on my Sun Certified Java Programmer-certificate and the Sun Certified Web Components Developer-certificate, I’ve had some time to decide which platform or framework I’d like to learn next. The choice was between front-end development and back-end development.

Today I’ve managed to skim the surface of two frameworks: Wicket and Hibernate. Wicket is a front-end component framework for the Java programming language. I’ve managed to read up some of the pages of the wiki and got some examples to work on my own tomcat server. My first impressions of this framework are quite ok; it takes way less time to actually get a simple webapp up and running as you don’t have to setup a big amount of XML files. You simply extend some of the classes or interfaces provided to you by the Wicket framework and you’re ready to go.

I always had a thing for webapps as opposed to the development of desktop applications. In my opinion a true webapp is powerless without access to a database. Although I’m a bit more interested in front-end development (and in this case, Wicket), i found myself installing the HSQLDB-server which is prescribed in a hibernate tutorial. I’m yet to discover the benefits of the hibernate framework, as time was flying by while reading today. I’ll be updating this post tomorrow, hopefully with pleasant findings on another framework :).

To be continued…