Preface

In 2004, we had a good idea what was wrong with the web frameworks we’d been using (Struts and Maverick) at Topicus for a number of our projects. They didn’t scale for development, they made refactoring hard, and they inhibited reuse, to name a few of our complaints. Just about everyone in our company agreed that developing web applications with Java wasn’t a lot of fun, particularly when it came to the web part; and those with experience in programming desktop applications wondered about the huge gap between the programming models of, say, Swing and Struts.

After a long search, one of our colleagues, Johan Compagner, stumbled across Wicket, which had been made publicly available by Jonathan Locke a few weeks earlier. Although it was still an alpha version and far from being ready to be used in our projects, everyone involved in the framework quest recognized its potential. We decided to start a prototype with it, and unless the prototype turned out to be hugely disappointing, this would be the framework for future projects.