Why doesn Wicket use Java 5?
We strive to make Wicket available for the largest possible number of developers. This means that we have to take into account those developers that don’t have the luxury of running their application servers on Java 5. Many shops don’t run on Java 5 yet. We would be doing ourselves and our users a great disservice when we would target Java 5 as our base platform. As several members of our community have pointed out, there is a code converter for running Java 5 code on a Java 1.4 runtime, RetroWeaver. Even though it is a remarkable product, and probably works flawlessly, we, the Wicket core team, can’t support using such a tool on a framework. Debugging web applications is already a very complex thing to do, and when we introduce such an unknown component (or to be more precise: 2 components), bug finding becomes even harder. Furthermore, some clients of our users won’t or can’t accept such retrofitted code. Also note that RetroWeaver only takes your source code into consideration. The
