When you are away from your open source endeavours for a week or two, you'll get a big inbox full of messages you need to catch up. There are two ways to tackle the 200+ threads that are waiting for your attention:

  1. mark them all read in one go
  2. read each message during the course of the week

Using #1 will lead you to miss out on some really great stuff. I was fortunate to use #2 for the Wicket user list: Andrew Broderick wrote on April 15th some really nice praise to the user list:

[T]he inherent ease of splitting things up into components, and the inherent encapsulation that comes with this, has shrunk our development time markedly. It also gives us a high level of confidence in what we've built, because once you get something working in isolation, it keeps working wherever you eventually put it. This is, I think, the single biggest benefit it gives us.

And he concludes:

We've thrown our site together quickly and under great time pressure, and Wicket has delivered. The inherent type safety you get from building the site from Java classes helps hugely. It means very few run-time bugs. The separation of markup means our web designer can work in the same codebase as our Java guys too, so no duplication of effort. In fact, what we have done wouldn't be possible in such a short time frame with any other framework.

I'd hate to have missed this message. Thanks Andrew!