java rebellion

while we have a varied stack at work right now, wicket seems to be the centerpiece. one problem with wicket is that the people who write it, don't use tdd in their work, so not only does wicket not have tests, but it is in fact designed against testability.

for example, on the wicket-dev mailing list:

Kent Tong:
Just that from the core Wicket code it seems the convention is to make methods final by default and make them non-final only when necessary.

Igor Vaynberg:
imho this shouldve been the default java convention. it takes more thought and analysis to design something to be overridable.

everyone who has tried to mock wicket objects knows what this design leads to.

while we're waiting for java7's hot code replace abilities like interface injection, there's a proprietary product called javarebel, that does almost all hot replaces on current vm's, including, changing method signatures and adding/removing methods. a bunch of guys at work have been using it, and they're quite happy with it. so happy in fact that they're now developing phpRoR-style, without tests, and just coding away and refreshing in the browser after each change. and sometimes writing tests afterwards.

no personal experience yet tho. also, there's a wicket-1.4m2 out, but we recently froze our dependencies to their current versions. :|