As Eelco voiced his opinion on the matter, I feel obligated to voice mine as well.
I think the default must remain development because it helps people out-of-the-box for the 99% usecase. Before they ever reach production they need to have a good and solid development experience. For new comers the features enabled in development mode are essential: - line precise error reporting in both Java and markup - detailed error pages with stack traces spilling out the internal guts - wicket ajax debug link - auto resource polling - component use check - serialization check Wicket is a very developer centric framework and defaulting to deployment mode would remove that edge. About 99% of the projects I create are one-off projects trying out a part of the API or trying to replicate a bug, or creating an example for the book or the site, or building a new component. Only 1% or even less of my applications are actually meant for production. The development mode helps me achieve 99% of my goals. Many people nowadays start using Wicket not by downloading the quickstart, but by just putting the Wicket dependency in a maven pom and generate the project classpath from that. It is a quick way of getting started and getting accustomed and used to the framework. I like to take Ruby on Rails as an example for this: the out-of-the-box experience for RoR is development centric: you can start coding away directly. This default setup is not intended to be used in production. Same goes for Wicket. With the proposed 'powered by wicket' button on each page, shifting to deployment mode will be a big drive once you get to production. :D Martijn -- Join the wicket community at irc.freenode.net: ##wicket Wicket 1.2.6 contains a very important fix. Download Wicket now! http://wicketframework.org
