Wicket in Action

The Wicket team is proud to announce the second beta release of the Wicket 6.x series. This release brings over many improvements over the 1.5.x series.

New and Noteworthy

Wicket Atmosphere

The Beta 2 contains a new experimental module Wicket Atmosphere, which brings serverside push to Wicket and provides a great way to render serverside markup and send it to the browsers of your users. Check out the atmosphere example in our Examples project to see it in action.

In your application’s init method you need to register the push event bus:

new EventBus(this); 

Somewhere where you want to push your changes to the client, you need to publish your event to the pushEventBus:

EventBus.get().post(input.getModelObject());

And finally you need to subscribe your page (or component) to the EventBus’s events with @Subscribe, taking in the typed parameter you post to the EventBus (in this case a String):

@Subscribe
public void receiveMessage(AjaxRequestTarget target, String message) {
    label.setDefaultModelObject(message);
    target.add(label);
}

To be able to use Wicket Atmosphere you need to include the following dependency:

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

Please note that this is still experimental.

This release

Check the roadmap with a list of the major goals. And the migration guide with all major and some minor changes between 1.5.x and 6.x series.

The Jira changelog of all closed ticket at Jira

To use it in Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.wicket</groupId>
    <artifactId>wicket-core</artifactId>
    <version>6.0.0-beta2</version>
</dependency>

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

There are no more planned API breaks but if you find something that can be made better now it the time to discuss it! We will try to avoid making any API changes in the Release Candidates that will follow this beta release.

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

The Wicket team!