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LOL! Obviously from someone with real-wold experience with the "complex tool".

Awesome Song::Rant!!

My song/Rant... with the smallest violin playing....

All Java projects can learn from Apple designers. You must balance power / flexible / easy-of-use, if not, you build things like Hibernate, Spring and other projects just like them. The funny thing is EVERY SINGLE PROJECT starts off Thin & Easy-to-use, then here comes success, and BOOM !!!

Focus is lost, mission is gone and feature after feature is added creating the monsters that get blogged as savors. It's easy to architect something Lightweight & Easy, what's hard is including in that original architecture a way to grow it without making it's derived versions more complicated.

If you think you can't learn from Apple's design process take a good look at the project your working on now, stop, and ask yourself... What could I remove that is not really needed because it can be done other ways? Then ask yourself is this really the best way to build this application. Then take a look at the IPod and see how that same logic works in design. Don't be like Microsoft and build 15 ways to do the same thing.

"From early on, we wanted a product that would seem so natural and so inevitable and so simple, you almost wouldn't think of it as having been designed"
Jonathan Ive, designer of the iPod

Wicket seems to be an exception from the general trend of Java frameworks towards bloat: No XML, no annotations, not even generics. I hope they can keep up the direction.