1. Introduction

Wicket has been around since 2004 and it has been an Apache project since 2007. During these years it has proved to be a solid and valuable solution for building enterprise web applications.

Wicket core developers have done a wonderful job with this framework and they continue to improve it release after release. However Wicket never provided a freely available documentation and even if you can find many live examples and many technical articles on the Internet (most of them at Wicket Examples Site and at Wicket in Action), the lack of an organized and freely available documentation has always been a sore point for this framework.

That’s quite an issue because many other popular frameworks (like Spring, Hibernate or Struts) offer a vast and very good documentation which substantially contributed to their success.

This document is not intended to be a complete reference for Wicket but it simply aims to be a straightforward introduction to the framework that should significantly reduce its learning curve. What you will find here reflects my experience with Wicket and it’s strictly focused on the framework. The various Wicket-related topics are gradually introduced using pragmatic examples of code that you can find in the according repository on Github. However remember that Wicket is a vast and powerful tool, so you should feel confident with the topics exposed in this document before starting to code your real applications!

For those who need further documentation on Wicket, there are many good books available for this framework.

Hope you’ll find this guide helpful. Have fun with Wicket!

Editors:
Andrea Del Bene, adelbene@apache.org
Martin Grigorov
Tobias Soloschenko
Igor Vaynberg
Carsten Hufe
Christian Kroemer
Daniel Bartl
Paul Borș
Joachim Rohde
Emond Papegaaij

PS: this guide is based on Wicket 9. However if you are using an older version you should find this guide useful as well, but it’s likely that the code and the snippets won’t work with your version.
PPS: although we try to do our best working on this guide, this document is a work in progress and may contain errors and/or omissions. That’s why any feedback of any kind is REALLY appreciated!

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