Apache Wicket 1.3 released The Wicket team wishes everybody a happy new year and starts 2008 promising with a fresh new release: Apache Wicket 1.3.
Apache Wicket <http://wicket.apache.org/> is a Java open source component based web application framework. Apache Wicket was established as a top level project at the Apache Software Foundation on June 20th 2007. With proper mark-up/logic separation, a POJO data model, and a refreshing lack of XML, Apache Wicket makes developing web-apps simple and enjoyable again. Swap the boilerplate, complex debugging and brittle code for powerful, reusable components written with plain Java and HTML. This new release features some considerable improvements over previous releases and stabilizes several coreAPI's. Highlights from this release: - last JDK-1.4 release (next release will be Java 5 based) - package move from wicket to org.apache.wicket—Wicket joined the Apache Software foundation and renaming all packages to go into the Apache namespace reflects this move - simplified models API—the number of Model classes was minimized, the Component parameter to theget/setObject methods has been removed as it was not always clear which component to provide - simplified converter API—converters now need two methods (see interface IConverter):convertToObject(String, Locale) and convertToString(Object, Locale), this makes rolling your own custom converters much easier - all URL's are now generated as relative URL's—this means it works with zero-config behind a proxy server - simplified validator API—the validator API has been decoupled from Wicket's form component hierarchy allowing you to create validators so that validators can be reused outside Wicket - guice support—want to use Google's guice as your dependency injection framework? wicket-guice makes it easy: @Inject private IService service; will inject the IService implementation into your Wicket component. - portlet support (JSR-168 <http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168>, JSR -286 <http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=286>)—Wicket pages can now work directly in a portal as portlets without changing a line of code (no separate component hierarchy), learn more about Wicket's portlet support in this presentation by Ate Douma: Wicket portlet primer<http://www.slideshare.net/ate.douma/wicket-portlet-primer> - switched logging API from commons-logging to slf4j - Velocity panel—project wicket-velocity allows you to integrate velocity templates as panels in your pages - YUI-calendar <http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/calendar//> time": http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/ based date picker (wicket-datetime) - improved Ajax support—new Ajax components can be added to the page and contribute new javascript dependencies to the page header, hide/show components using Ajax without workarounds ( setOutputMarkupPlaceHolderTag) - added <wicket:enclosure> and <wicket:container> tags— <wicket:enclosure> is a grouping tag for controlling visibility of markup surrounding a component, <wicket:container> can add components' markup in places where it would make the page non-w3c compliant - stateless pages and components for those parts of your application that needs to scale - hybrid URL encoding to make search engines and your users happy (see Thoof <http://thoof.com/> for an example in action) - nested form components—create panels that contain forms and use them anywhere without having to worry about the nesting of forms - minimized session use by storing component hierarchy in file system (DiskPageStore) And much more small updates, bug fixes, upgrades and new features. As there have been API breaks you will need to do some work on your existing applications to make it 1.3 compliant. This is not a drop-in replacement for Wicket 1.2. The release is accompanied with a migration guide<http://cwiki.apache.org/WICKET/migrate-13.html> . You can see Wicket in action with our live examples<http://wicketstuff.org/wicket13> The distribution contains the Wicket jars and all sources, including the examples. You can download the release on one of the Apache mirrors<http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/wicket/1.3.0> While we take a break recuperating from the holidays, we have begun planning the next version: it will be Java 5 based, introduce generics into the models, and some other nice stuff<http://cwiki.apache.org/WICKET/wicket-14-wish-list.html>. You can help and discuss the future of Wicket on our mailing list.
