Starting the new year with a bang the Wicket Team has released Apache Wicket 1.3. With this release comes a lot of great successes, but most of all the team wanted to express their wishes to everyone for a happy new year.

Apache Wicket is one of the fastest growing Java open source component based web frameworks. With a focus on producing valid html and a logical separation between design and code. Within minutes you can start to enjoy throwing out tag soup, complex components and high maintenance overhead for a simple POJO + html data model.

Take a look at some of the following highlights or skip to the bottom and get started now.

  • last JDK-1.4 release (next release will be Java 5 based)
  • first Apache release: renamed packages to org.apache.wicket
  • simplified several core APIs
  • now works with zero-config behind a proxy server using relative URLs
  • added Google Guice support
  • use your Wicket pages directly in a portal without changing a line of code (JSR-168/JSR-286 support)
  • switched logging API from commons-logging to slf4j
  • integrate velocity templates as panels in your pages
  • YUI-calendar and Joda time based date picker (wicket-datetime)
  • contribute new javascript dependencies to the page header using an Ajax requeset
  • improved, more robust header contributions
  • scale to extremely large numbers of users with stateless pages and components
  • improved AjaxTree/AjaxTreeTable
  • hybrid URL encoding to make search engines and your users happy
  • create form panels and use them anywhere without worrying about the nesting of form tags
  • minimized session use by storing component hierarchy in file system (DiskPageStore)

Get started today by checking out the following examples or follow the download link directly at the bottom.

Best wishes from the Wicket Team and a prosperous 2008!