Wicket 1.4 M1 - New and Noteworthy

The first milestone has arrived. Here are some of the more noteworthy things available in milestone build M1 (May 2, 2008) which is now available for download. See the build notes for details about bugs fixed and other changes.

Wicket core

Java 5 required

Previous releases of Wicket required at a minimum Java 1.4. We have now decided (after consulting our user base) that from now on, Wicket will run only on Java 5 or newer. This will grant us the opportunity to utilize the new features that Java 5 brings, of which generics are the most prevalent use.

In the very least you should update your Java compiler settings:

 
<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
        <source>1.5</source>
        <target>1.5</target>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

New project layout for Wicket project

First cut at generified Models

The Wicket project uses the IModel interface to bind components to your data. For instance showing a list of people's names in Wicket 1.3 looks like

Notice the ugly cast needed to get the person from the item? In Wicket 1.4 this has been modified to use generics so components know their types:

This enables the Java compiler to generate errors like the following screenshot shows:

Wicket IOC

Wicket Spring and Annot have been merged

Since all Wicket projects are now Java 5 based, there is no need to keep the Java 5 Spring annotations out of the wicket-spring library. These two libraries have been merged into one. So all you now have to do to include Wicket's Spring support is add the following dependency to your Maven pom (or drop just one jar file in your lib folder):

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.wicket</groupId>
    <artifactId>wicket-spring</artifactId>
    <version>1.4-m1</version>
</dependency>