On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 7:57 AM, napple fabble <jm.postili...@gmail.com>wrote:
> > We're starting a new project and thinking about using Wicket for > presentation > layer. > > One concern is about backwards compatibility and support. I understand 1.5 > is coming and in not fully backwards compatible. > Correct. Our numbering is X.Y.Z, where .Z releases must be backwards compatible (i.e. 1.4.8 -> 1.4.9), but X and Y (i.e. 1.4 -> 1.5) do not have to be. > > The concerns: > > If we start with wicket 1.4.8, a few years from now all development is done > to 1.5.x and no one cares about boring old 1.4 anymore. No bugs will get > fixed anymore and when Internet Explorer 10 is released, page markup, > javascript, and AJAX features stop working. We support two branches at a time, so 1.4 support wouldn't go away until 1.6 was started. > We need to do an expensive > wicket 1.4->1.5 port for our application. > It shouldn't be that bad. Igor and Matej can comment more, but most of the changes are in the request cycle and URL encoding / decoding. 95% of your application doesn't specifically touch those parts (and some applications never really touch those other than mounting a bookmarkable page or package). > > Or, we start with wicket 1.5. It gets GA released whenever, and goes > through > a few years of being buggy and unmature. > I would not describe our past x.y.0 releases to be "buggy and unmature" for a few years. If that were the case, we would have failed as a project long ago. x.y.0 releases of Wicket are generally pretty solid. New point releases are generally released very quickly after the .0 release to fix the bugs that will invariably be found just after release. > > What's the best option to take now? How big are the "backwards incompatible > changes" planned for 1.5? What's the schedule for 1.5? How mature are > wicket > x.0 releases usually? What's the track record on updating older releases? > For now, 1.5 is not ready for production use, and you will have a harder time getting support for it because you won't have the thousands of Wicket users who can help you with problems. Start with 1.4.9 (which will be released tomorrow). Martijn has already announced that his company has a very large application that they have just ported to 1.4.x. They will now be maintaining a branch that runs on 1.5.x. This will be tremendously helpful because he's a core committer, and our PMC chairman, and will now have a vested interest in improving 1.5. Of course, his company may also be able to supply additional development resources. But either way, it at least gives us someone who can report on the quality of 1.5 and improve it. -- Jeremy Thomerson http://www.wickettraining.com
