A Wicket Diary

The Wicket team has released the first (and hopefully last) beta of the upcoming 1.1 release of Wicket. The 1.1 beta release has the following features available:

• Full JavaScript and CSS support - allowing you to package JavaScript and/or CSS with your component, and have it contribute the JavaScript/CSS to the header of the including page
• Markup inheritence - ever wanted to create a base page with a menu, some DIVs or other standard components, which are present on ALL pages in your application? Wicket already supported inheritence on the Java side of things, but now includes markup inheritence. This allows you to create such template pages and have subclasses fill in the blanks.
• Simplification of Choice component - we had some complaints on the 1.0 implementation of the Choice components being too complex, so we revisited this component. This will break stuff in your application, but it has improved considerable!
• EXPERIMENTAL AJAX support. There is some experimental AJAX support available. But not for the faint of heart and only when you don’t mind changing API’s. USE AT YOUR OWN RISC!
• Component seperator character has been altered from ‘.’ (dot) to ‘:’ (colon), paving the path for OGNL type paths in form components, this allows for even more shorter code in your forms (e.g.
  )
• Component reference examples in the Wicket examples download
• Date picker component in extensions - as a first component utilizing our new JavaScript support, Wicket now has a very cool and rich Date picker in the extensions package. Check it out and (re)discover the ease of component based development!

This release features many (small) improvements, so go to the SourceForge download pages, download Wicket, Extensions and the examples and have fun!

The first beta release of Wicket 1.1 is only a few hours old and we already have a raving ‘review’ on the userlist. To quote Matej Knopp:

1.1.0-b1 is a great release. I’ve succesfully upgraded my current project. It was almost painless Actually, it consisting of removing a class that was a wrapper around ListMultipleChoice, because it was obsolete in 1.1, as well as removing my own ChoiceList implementation, since it’s no longer required. In general, using 1.1 I could remove some code and the application became simpler and nicer

IChoiceRenderer is great, shorter urls are much nicer too.

I’m going to drop border in favour of markup inheritance.

The overall impression is very positive, thank you for this release.

-Matej

Do I need to say more? Go find out why YOU should try Wicket in your next or even current Web project!