16 Jul 2012

The Wicket team is proud to announce the third beta release of the Wicket 6.x series. This release is an intermediary release just before we give you 6.0.0 final.

There are no more planned API breaks but if you find something that can be made better now it the time to discuss it! The next planned release is 6.0.0 final, so speak now or forever be silenced (or learn to live with it until 7.0.0 comes out).

Any feedback about the new features, their implementation and their documentation is very welcome!

New and Noteworthy in 6.0.0-beta3

NOTA BENE: the use of modules that are marked experimental, by being part of the sub module ‘wicket-experimental’, are really that: experimental. These modules can change, disappear or blow up your computer without notice and you really use/depend on them at your own risk.

Wicket Native Websockets

A new experimental module has been added to Wicket 6 - Wicket Native WebSocket. This module adds support for using HTML5 WebSockets as you may use Ajax in your Wicket applications.

All you have to do is to add a WebSocketBehavior to your page and from there on you can receive messages from the clients and push messages back to them.

At our wiki you may find the documentation and a link to a demo application.

If something is not clear feel free to ask your question in the mailing lists and we will improve the documentation.

Wicket Bootstrap

The experimental modules now contain a new module for integration with Twitter’s Bootstrap. Currently this module only provides a central way of using the Bootstrap resources. In the future we will provide proper components and behaviors for the Bootstrap concepts.

To use this new experimental module, add this to your pom:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.wicket</groupId>
    <artifactId>wicket-bootstrap</artifactId>
    <version>0.1</version>
</dependency>

To add Bootstrap support to your pages, add this in the renderHead method:

@Override
public void renderHead(IHeaderResponse response) {
    super.renderHead(response);

    Bootstrap.renderHead(response);
}

This will render a dependency to the Twitter bootstrap CSS and JS files, including the required dependency to JQuery.

New Wicket Examples

We have started an effort to revamp the tried and tested Wicket Examples and bring them into 2012. The new examples are located in the experimental module.

It is currently a copy of Twitter Bootstrap’s design but with Wicket specific filling.

You can test the examples by running the

wicket-examples-jar/src/test/java/Start.java

class in the default package.

The examples will feature a component reference with typical use cases, full examples such as Hello, World, and descriptions of the code in play.

Wicket Atmosphere

Wicket Atmosphere in the experimental modules has seen an upgrade of the Atmosphere dependency to 1.0.0-beta3. This has caused an incompatibility with Jetty 7.6.3 (used with Wicket and the examples). To mitigate this, you need to override either:

• the dependency on Jetty to 8.1.3 or newer, or
• the dependency on Atmosphere to 0.9.5 (0.9.6 and 0.9.7 are broken as well)

See WICKET-4656 for more information regarding this issue.

This release

• Check the roadmap with a list of the major goals: 6.0 roadmap
• And the migration guide with all major and some minor changes between 1.5.x and 6.x series: migration guide
• The Jira changelog of all closed ticket at Jira: changelog

To use it in Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.wicket</groupId>
    <artifactId>wicket-core</artifactId>
    <version>6.0.0-beta3</version>
</dependency>

If you don’t use a dependencies management build tool then you can download the full distribution (including source) and build from source yourself.

Have fun,

The Wicket team!