Foreword

In the spring of 2004, I was working on a startup idea with Miko Matsumura, whom I met in 1997 when he was Sun’s Chief Java Evangelist. This particular idea was called Voicetribe (a name I have since used for another startup) and involved VOIP and cell phone technologies (and might still one day make a good startup). Unfortunately, even in the earliest stages of prototyping this system, I found myself extremely frustrated by then-existing Java web-tier technologies. This brought my attention to a technically interesting infrastructure problem that nobody had yet solved to my full satisfaction: web frameworks.

Several 60-hour weeks later, the first version of Wicket was born. (In case you’re wondering, Wicket was the first fun and unique-sounding short word that Miko also liked and that wasn’t being used for a major software project. It also appears in some dictionaries as a cricket term for “a small framework at which the bowler aims the ball.”) I’m happy to say that after more than four years and the input of many man-years of effort from the open source community, Wicket now meets most if not all of my criteria for a web framework.