What is Apache Wicket?

Apache Wicket is an open-source, component-oriented web application framework for Java, conceptually similar to JavaServer Faces and Apache Tapestry. It was originally written by Jonathan Locke in 2004, reached its 1.0 release in 2005, and graduated to an Apache Software Foundation top-level project in 2007.

Its defining idea is treating a web page as a tree of reusable, stateful Java objects (components) bound to plain HTML templates through a wicket:id attribute, rather than mixing markup and logic in JSPs or writing request-handling code by hand. As of mid-2026 the project actively maintains three parallel branches: Wicket 8 and 9 for teams still on older Java/Jakarta baselines, and Wicket 10 (currently at 10.10.0), built on Java 17 and the Jakarta namespace, as the actively developed line.

It's still used in production at governments, banks, universities, and email providers, prized less for hype and more for letting Java developers build maintainable UIs without hand-rolling a JavaScript-heavy front end.