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.

Although Wicket has grown into a sophisticated piece of technology that has extended my original vision in every direction, I feel the community that has formed around Wicket is even more impressive. That community began when I made Wicket open source under the Apache license on Codehaus. A group of programmers from the Dutch consulting firm Topicus, led by Eelco Hillenius, Martijn Dashorst, and Johan Compagner, saw the potential in Wicket and were inspired to join Juergen Donnerstag and Chris Turner in forming the core team that would propel the project forward.

This core team has now been extended to include a dozen other top-notch engineers and scores of individual contributors, but there was an intense period in those first months in which the Wicket vision and the Wicket team gelled into something special. To this day, the core development team, the wicket-user mailing list, and the Wicket IRC channel (##wicket) are a reflection of the energy and enthusiasm of this original group. Today, Nabble.com shows wicket-user as one of the most actively trafficked mailing lists in the Java space (third only to Java.net and Netbeans) and the single most actively trafficked web-framework mailing list in the Java space (even more than Ruby on Rails, by a wide margin). This traffic is a reflection of countless hours of helpful support, brainstorming, negotiation, and open design work. I’m thankful to the global community that has invested so much in Wicket.

This growing Wicket community is now in the process of bursting out all over the web—and blog posts, download statistics, new projects, user groups, and articles in the press reflect that. Startups like Thoof, Joost, Sell@Market, GenieTown, and B-Side; midsized companies like Vegas.com, LeapFrog, TeachScape, Servoy, and Hippo; and large companies like IBM, Tom-Tom, Nikon, VeriSign, Amazon, and SAS are all joining the Wicket community, whether for large, scalable front-end websites or internal projects with a high degree of UI complexity.

Although Wicket was born once in my study and again in the open source community (and in particular in its migration to Apache), it’s now being born one final time, because a framework without an authoritative book somehow isn’t quite “real.” I’ve been watching from the sidelines for over a year as Martijn and Eelco have slavishly devoted long nights and weekends to write the book you’re now reading. Wicket in Action is the complete and authoritative guide to Wicket, written and reviewed by the core members of the Apache Wicket team. If there’s anything you want to know about Wicket, you are sure to find it in this book, described completely and accurately—and with the sense of humor and play that the Dutch seem to bring to everything.

Enjoy!

JONATHAN LOCKE

Founder of Apache Wicket