It has come to the conclusion: we've finally released Wicket 1.2. It took some very long hours and hard working days: blood, sweat and tears were spilled, babies were born (congratulations Igor!) and hell froze over.

This release is a major landmark in the (short) history of the Wicket project. I've blogged several times when we released the release candidates, so you may already be familiar with the new and improved list:

  • Native, cross-platform AJAX support: use AJAX
    without having to write a single line of
    JavaScript. Wicket's AJAX cross-platform
    capabilities

    have been rated 'A'
    </p>
  • Render multiple components in one AJAX call,
    where each component can occupy any part of the
    page
  • Improved markup inheritance: panels, pages,
    header contributions
  • Improved and simplified internationalization
    (i18n) support, using ,
    better resource bundle lookup strategy </li>
  • Out of the box default resource bundles for many
    languages, including
    English, German, Spanish, Portugese, French,
    Hungarian, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, Swedish, Japanese,
    Chinese, Italian, Bulgarian and Farzi (Iranian).
  • Multiple form component validation, validate two
    or more fields that are related
  • Improved form handling: clear form validation
    workflow that allows you to much easier defined
    required and type conversion attributes of a
    form component
  • Nice URL support through URL mounting
  • Markup fragments (inline panels)
  • Improved performance by replacing OGNL with our
    own object graph language parser
  • Response filter support, added ServerTime and
    ServerClientTime filters
  • Reloading of resource bundles in development
    mode
  • Improved unit test support for your Wicket
    components and pages through the WicketTester,
    create unittests that run outside the container.
  • Out-of-the-box AJAX components: paging
    navigator, link with fallback, auto-updater,
    AJAX form, AJAX submit buttons, etc.
  • Improved authorization and authentication
    support, giving you the power to specify
    authorization at the component level. An example
    project featuring a role based, annotation
    framework is now part of the standard
    distribution.
  • Spring support for injecting your business logic
    into your web pages in a non-intrusive manner,
    while still being able to use the convenient
    Wicket idiom for creating pages (using the Java
    new
    operator). </li>

  • Improved settings system: settings are now
    partitioned into logical groupings to make them
    easier to find
  • Numerous bug fixes and minor improvements
  • </ul>

    Wicket runs on any application server supporting the servlet
    API version 2.3 and higher, and will work on Java 1.4 SDK's
    or newer.

    We have tried to keep API changes to a minimum, but had to change and remove some methods and classes. Wicket 1.2 will not be a drop-in replacement, though most of your application's pages and components should not be affected. There is a migration guide available on our wiki:

    Migrating to Wicket 1.2

    The Wicket 1.2 release is a highly anticipated major landmark in the history of Wicket. The core development team wishes to extend their gratitude to all users who helped build and test this release.

    Enjoy and have fun!