Hi Mihir- The approach is similar to how the JDK is rapidly iterating versions. Features carry forward, less maintenance for the committers for the in-between LTS releases.
-Matt > On Sep 11, 2026, at 10:13 AM, Mihir Chhaya <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello, > > Could you help me understand this a bit more? > > In 'Our Plan' section, you have mentioned cadence of one major release > every quarter with support for that major release until next major release. > > Does this mean a feature released in first quarter will be supported only > until the next quarter? Or the features released in all four quarters will > be supported until next LTS release the following year? > > Thank you, > -Mihir > > On Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 10:06 AM Emond Papegaaij <[email protected]> wrote: > >> 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 >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
