[Wicket-develop] Wicket 1.2 released!

[Martijn Dashorst]

The Wicket project has released Wicket 1.2. Wicket is a Java component based web application framework licensed under the open source Apache 2 license. Wicket allows Java developers to create highly dynamic web applications using plain Java and HTML.

This is the third major release of the Wicket web framework and marks a major milestone after 7 months of hard labor by the core team of developers and the users of the framework. This release has been anticipated for several months and sports many major new features and improvements over previous releases. Major features of Wicket 1.2 include:

• 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'
• 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 <wicket:message>, better resource bundle lookup strategy
• 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).
• Improved settings system: settings are now partitioned into logical groupings to make them easier to find
• Numerous bug fixes and minor improvements

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!

- The Wicket team