Thanks and keep on the good work! PS. We are still on 1.4 so we might make it our goal to switch straight upto 14 ;)
** Martin ke 9.9.2026 klo 16.00 Emond Papegaaij ([email protected]) kirjoitti: > Dear community, > > TL;DR > The release cycle of Apache Wicket will change starting at the upcoming > Wicket 11 release in early October. We will do one more release of 8.x and > 9.x and then stop supporting those old versions entirely, and with them > javax.servlet. We will move to time-based releases, with a new major > release every 3 months and an LTS release once per year. Wicket 10 is our > current LTS and will remain supported until the release of Wicket 14, > expected July 2027, which will be the next LTS. > > Slowdown > Wicket has been around for over 20 years now. Where it used to have a very > vibrant and active community, development and contributions have slowed > down over the past 10 years. Partly this is because Wicket has a stable and > solid core that simply doesn't need that much maintenance, but it's also > caused by the world moving more to JavaScript-heavy, client-side > frameworks. This slowdown also caused the release cadence to slow down. > This in turn made it less attractive to contribute, causing even more > slowdown. > > LLMs > Over the past 6 months, we've seen a sharp rise in LLM-generated security > reports. This helps improve security, but dealing with CVEs takes a lot of > time and it's currently multiplied by 4 because of the old versions we > support. The time spent on backporting, releasing and documenting these old > versions is time not spent on the improvement of Wicket itself. At the same > time, LLMs allow us to perform cleanups and improvements on a larger scale, > but with major versions years apart, our promise of semver makes it > impossible to deliver these changes to our community in a timely manner. > > Stability > A large number of applications build on the stability of the Wicket API. > This is no different for our community than it is for the team of core > developers. This stability is very important to the entire Wicket ecosystem > and something we do not take lightly. For some changes, we do need to break > the API, but it is something we will only do if it is really needed. If > possible, we will try to keep the old API as a deprecated alternative for > some time to ease migration. API changes will be documented in our > migration guide. > > Our plan > We want to move the release cycle of Apache Wicket to a reliable, faster, > time-based schedule in which we can bring enhancements and new features to > our users quickly, but at the same time provide a stable basis to build on. > We've therefore agreed on a release cadence of one major release every 3 > months in which we bring new features. These versions will be supported > until the next major release. Every fourth major release (once a year) will > be an LTS release with bugfixes and security support until the next LTS > release. This means we only need to support 2 active versions at the same > time. > > We will start this new cadence in the first week of October with the > release of Wicket 11.0.0. We will do one more release of the 8.x and 9.x > branches, after which they will both be considered EOL. This means that we > will also stop supporting the javax.servlet API. Wicket 10 will be our > first LTS release line, supported until the release of Wicket 14 in the > first week of July 2027. > > Kind regards, > The Apache Wicket PMC >
