A Wicket Diary

Thies Edeling migrates eHour, an open source, web based time tracker application, to Wicket and gives a detailed how to guide. Especially for new developers this seems like a good place to monitor as Thies migrates more elements of his application.

The next hurdle towards graduation has been overcome: the Incubator Project Management Committee has approved to ask the Apache Board to establish “Apache Wicket” as a top level project.

This is mumble jumble to say: should the Board accept the resolution on their next meeting, Wicket will become a full fledged Apache project. The next board meeting is scheduled for June 20.

When that happens a number of things need to be done before we are where we want to be.

• http://incubator.apache.org/wicket needs to go to http://wicket.apache.org
• move the user mailing list over to Apache
• move the repository from http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/wicket to http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/wicket
• etc.

Please join me in thanking the Incubator PMC for their trust bestowed in the Wicket community. We will not disappoint you!

The Wicket graduation proposal has been put in front of the Incubator PMC. This basically means that the Incubator project management committee (IPMC) will decide whether they approve of Wicket becoming a top level Apache project.

You can monitor the proposal here: [VOTE] Graduate Apache Wicket from the incubator.

The process is now as follows:

• the IPMC votes on our proposal for graduation
• if successful, the proposal is submitted to the next Apache board meeting (june 20th)
• if accepted, we will start transfering the WIcket project to its top level location and migrate the lists, repo, etc.

You might wonder how releases are done in the mean time? Well, we will continue to issue releases, but they will continue to pass the IPMC before we can make them available (though I expect not too many delays in this procedure).

This is an extra burden, but one we need to go through until we are graduated. After graduation we can cut down a bit on the release times, as the Apache Wicket PMC is then responsible for the releases.

Onward with graduation!

The ServerSide.com has interviewed Nick Heudecker (author of Hibernate Quickly with regards to Wicket. Nick talks about the Wicket framework, its technology, how to quickly get into it, and how it compares against JSF in this TSS feature interview.

In another interview Eugene Ciurana had a chat with Kito Mann on: how JSF compares to Wicket. (Kito’s interview begins at 04″14″)

It’s official: we have a feature freeze for 1.3.0. This means only bug fixes should be committed to the repo and we should be heading steadily to a first release candidate.

Unfortunately we still have several nasty open issues that need some serious TLC and we still have to graduate some day. Fortunately our community has voted to graduate from the incubator and we are doing all necessary steps to get there.

Meanwhile other very interesting times are abound:

• a coworker has submitted a nice security framework for Wicket to the wicket-stuff project.
• Graeme Roche has created a Wicket Grails plugin
• Peter Thomas (of jtrac fame) has compared JSF to Wicket in a simple forum application

On with graduation and 1.3!