Wicket is now a top level Apache project

We are now officially graduated! Soon you can find as at http://wicket.apache.org.

I’d like to parrot Martijn, thanking the board, our mentors and ourselves for getting there. Hieperdepiep… hoera!

It’s all coming nicely together now: graduating, releasing 1.3 and entering MEAP with Wicket In Action all this summer.

We sometimes wonder how many people have installations with Wicket by now. Though there are a number of public ones we know of, like Thoof, Eventful, Vegas, Meetmoi, Zoomf, Sell@Market, Genietown, B-Side, Voicetribe, Datawink, Trackdetective, and a couple of sites with difficult names , and we know of a couple of open source projects that use or build on Wicket, like Pax Wicket, Webical, Artifactory, JTrac, Tally-ho, Irrigator, Burgerweeshuis and Papernapkin’s pastebin, I expect most sites using Wicket to be intranet sites. That is just because it is my uneducated guess that about 80% of the webapps produced today are internal systems rather than public facing. I also expect that we only learn of a fraction of the web applications built with Wicket. I base that on the fact that I’ve been using many open source projects over the years, and rarely have signed up for their mailing lists or otherwise let people know I was using their project, and also because I have spoken to quite a few people during the last year who did not list their projects on the Wiki, but told me they were already doing their 3rd or 4rd project with Wicket.

Anyway, even if we don’t really know how well our real ‘penetration’ is, it is great to see that since the start, downloads and subscribers only have been growing, and that there is hardly any negative publicity on the framework. And that actually surprises me. There are so many choices to make in software development, that you’ll always have loads of people who think you’re doing it all wrong.

Another thing that is great is that even Wicket 1.2, our current stable release, works well for so many people. Our next release, Wicket 1.3, of which we hope to release the second beta this weekend, is a lot better than it’s predecessor in almost every aspect. I won’t go into detail here, but please, this weekend: download it and try it for yourself! Or download a snapshot from our repository of course.