Installing Wicket

So you chose not to use one of the ready to use Maven archetypes, but rather roll things on your own. While possible, it needs some close attention to make things work properly. Most notable things you need to take care of are:

  • dependencies
  • logging

Required dependencies to use Wicket

While we are adamant users of Apache Maven and its build infrastructure, this may not be to everyone’s liking. However, if you wish to learn all about which dependencies you need for your Wicket project, we ask you to learn to read the POM file format and retrieve the required versions stated there. We take great care to keep the POM files up to date with the latest and greatest of each dependency.

Compilation & Testing

At a minimum a vanilla Wicket application requires for compilation:

  • Java SDK 1.5 or newer
  • servlet-api
  • slf4j-api
  • any slf4j implementation and dependencies necessary for that logging provider
  • junit if you build Wicket from source or want to use WicketTester to test your pages and components

Runtime dependencies

At a minimum a barebones Wicket application requires the following at runtime:

  • a servlet container (Apache Tomcat, Jetty) or any JEE container
  • Java 5 runtime or newer
  • slf4j-api and your slf4j implementation and required logging provider dependencies.

Logging

As of Wicket 1.3.0, Wicket uses the SLF4J project for logging. SLF4J is similar to commons-logging, in that it allows libraries/frameworks like Wicket to avoid forcing a choice of logging framework on their users.

You cannot use Wicket without adding an SLF4J logging implementation to your classpath. Most people use log4j. If you do, just include slf4j-log4j12.jar on your classpath to get Wicket to use log4j too. If you want to use commons-logging or JDK14 logging or something else, please see the SLF4J site for more information.