The Wicket open source project, founded in the spring of 2004 by Jonathan Locke, an original member of the JFC “Swing” development team at JavaSoft, is going to be announcing at JavaOne 2005 the release of Wicket 1.0, said the Wicket development team today.

The team - Martijn Dashorst, Eelco Hillenius, Chris Turner, Juergen Donnerstag, Johan Compagner and Gwyn Evans - has driven the open source development of the Wicket Java Web Framework under the Apache Software License and Miko Matsumura, former Java evangelist at Sun Microsystems and currently a vice president at Infravio, welcomed the announcement, saying:

"Wicket is very clean, elegant and component-oriented. With version 1.0 deployed at real enterprises, it is ready for prime-time."

Wicket splits the creation of dynamic Web pages into a design domain and a code domain. This allows both groups to work quickly without stepping on each other’s toes. Web pages are kept in XHTML pages, which can be edited with standard Web tools, such as DreamWeaver or Go Live. These pages are made dynamic by associating components coded in Java. Wicket components are extensible within the Java language, much like Swing components and can be backed by POJO (Plain Old Java Object) model objects that can be persisted using an ORM tool, such as Hibernate or JDO.

"Wicket development is so much easier. We don't have to explain all configuration files used in our previous MVC framework, or how the Velocity language works to new project members. It is you, the Java and the HTML," Kees Mastenbroek, project leader at Topicus B.V., stated. "Wicket has dramatically improved our ability to create large scale Web applications with complex user interfaces. The ability to reuse every component in Wicket, whether it is a page, a panel or an input field, led to significant productivity gains, and allows us to handle complexity better than ever before."

Matsumura will be speaking on the Wicket Java Web Framework on Tuesday, June 28 at 11:00am-12:00pm, Moscone Center North meeting room 121/122 with Martijn Dashorst, senior staff engineer at Topicus. Wicket is also involved in session TS-7642 "Web Framework Smackdown" on Wednesday, June 29 at 4:00-5:00pm, Moscone Center/Esplanade meeting room 307-310.

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