A Wicket Diary

The SourceForge statistics are online again and this time they look better than ever. Wicket has almost 4000 downloads in its history. This is more than we expected, as our framework is still very young, and we haven’t done much publicity wise (no articles, no online presentations, no books).

The sourceforge statistics are not the complete story however:

• we also publish our jar files in the maven repository, so people can download and use wicket from maven
• CVS downloads are not taken into account
• the number of downloads may not reflect the actual number of users: one download per project seems more likely

We are very content with these statistics and hope that when we publish our 1.0 final release, that the downloads will rise even further.

There is no rest for the Wicket project. Since we’ve basically finalized our 1.0 development (all that remains is flushing out possible breakages between RC2 and RC3), development has started on features for Wicket 1.1

With JavaOne coming up, and with 2 presentations concerning Wicket, both Eelco and I are quite busy preparing ourselves for the presentations:

• the Web Framework Smackdown - Tapestry, JSF, Struts Shale Webwork and Wicket fight it out
• POJO Web Development with Wicket - Miko Matsumura and myself

See you at JavaOne!

Finally the Wicket project has delivered the last release before 1.0 final. This release marks a significant portion of work (normally this shouldn’t be on a release candidate, but hey, we want only the best for you). From the release notes:

Finally, after a month of some silence, we have produced our last release candidate before we deploy 1.0. If all goes well, you will see the final release within a week or two. The bug list now only contains an issue relating to clustering. As such we advise you currently to not deploy your application on a cluster, until the issues are resolved, or to be very thorough in your clustering tests.
In this release you won’t see major API changes, however the internals have improved significantly. The request cycle has now correct semantics, we have improved the redirect after post pattern, which now performs significantly better than before, and allows you to do your request handling and rendering in one pass, and then redirect to the rendered page. CompoundModel support has improved and works with more components than before. We added support for redirecting to external url’s (e.g. Google) directly by introducing RedirectPage.
For the complete list of fixes, updates and changes please see the release history.

At the end of the coming week, we will release the final version. So PLEASE TEST THIS RELEASE and see if you can find bug which we haven’t discovered yet!

Technorati Tags: java, web framework, wicket

We are going to release Wicket 1.0-rc3 these coming days. I’ve got to find the right moment to perform the build and deploy it to sourceforge. In this new Wicket release you won’t find new features, but almost all bugs are solved and we are confident we will be able to squash the last one in a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps we won’t be able to solve it completely before we go ahead and declare 1.0 final, but then again, not everybody needs round robin clustering support.

I’ve also got to install a new wiki and convert the old data of the current wiki to the new one.

Technorati Tags: java, web framework, wicket

As I’ve committed myself to the Apple platform, I’m in need of a new blog editor. Ecto seems like the way to go. As it is both a Windows client (laptop from work needs Windows) and OSX, and it supports roller as a blogging server, this program almost seems too good to be true.

I’m trying this one out with this message, so don’t expect too much information yet on the forthcoming Wicket release candidate.

Technorati Tags: ecto, macosx, blogging