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Apache Wicket 1.5 Released

Posted by Kostis Kapelonis on Nov 16, 2011

Sections: Architecture & Design,; Development
Topics: Wicket ,; Java Web Frameworks ,; Java ,; Languages ,; Open Source ,; Apache ,; Programming ,; Frameworks

The Apache Wicket project has released version 1.5 of its open source, component oriented Java web application framework. The major changes include:

Support for four new HTML 5 components (EmailTextField, NumberTextField, UrlTextField and RangeTextField.), which map to respective client side functionality as defined in HTML5
Improvements to the message/event model, such that components can now exchange messages/events via the EventSink and EventSource mechanism. These interfaces are already implemented by the standard Wicket classes: Component, RequestCycle, Session, and Application.

The list of changes covers several other topics such as unified component rendering, caching, and RequestCycle hookups.

There are also number of other, more minor changes, which developers need to be aware of:

The artifact name has changed from the artifact name from wicket to wicket-core. Including Wicket in a Maven based project should therefore now follow the new artifact naming:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.wicket</groupId>
    <artifactId>wicket-core</artifactId>
    <version>1.5.3</version>
</dependency>

Continuing with the upgrade to Java 5 from Wicket 1.4, this version now requires a servlet container that supports at least 2.5 of the servlet-api specification. All functionality that was marked as deprecated in Wicket 1.4 has been removed. Wicket also depends on Junit 4.x from now on (4.8.2).

Information on the type of a request parameter (GET or POST) is now available, as follows:

//GET request
StringValue parameterValue = RequestCycle.get().getRequest().getQueryParameters().getParameterValue(parameterName);

// POST request
StringValue parameterValue = RequestCycle.get().getRequest().getPostParameters().getParameterValue(parameterName);

Finally XML property files have been renamed from .xml to .properties.xml for better description of their content.

After more than 2 years in development, the depth of changes in the Wicket internals prevents mixing the old and new versions of the framework together. If you wish to upgrade, all your wicket libraries should be upgraded to 1.5.x versions.

Whilst development of the 1.5.x releases is ongoing, framework developers are already discussing the roadmap for the next major release.

For more information, visit the Wiki, Reference documentation, and Javadocs. Bugs and problems can be reported on the Wicket issue tracker.