The idea of Webby is to provide a little bit of structure and generic functionality to make building applications easier.
I like concentrating on writing code which solves business issues, e.g. supporting business transactions (customer/order/production information and their history and analysis) or an optimizer supporting financial or production decisions.
I don't like writing code implementing repetitive functionality or just code for input and output of data. Also writing a lot (of code) just for providing a (simple) user interface is not a preferred activity of mine.
Certainly I am not the first one with these preferences, but unfortunately creating (web based and datadriven) applications efficiently can still be a cumbersome task. With Webby and it's related projects and examples I'd like to add my 2 cents to this; maybe the concepts, ideas and discussions help making IT life a bit easier. If it does not help: Then it's at least fun for me trying ;-)
Webby is a framework/toolkit for supporting data centric web applications. Webby is based upon Wicket. The goal is to add some structure, leave less control about the UI to the developer, in return make it quicker to create a complete UI, either for a new or for an existing business object model.
The current status of Webby does not accomplish this completely yet, but it's a start.
Webby itself is independent of any persistence framework. If however you are using or intend to use hibernate (many do use it), have a look at webby4db which is a thin layer on top (or underneath?) webby: It uses a small but smart tool called databinder, and by doing so, it links wicket, hibernate, databinder and webby. Why all this? Because it should be easy to create data centric web applications. But now I'm repeating myself. By the way, the examples of webby all use webby4db.
Many approaches exist to help making the creation of web based applications easier. Wicket seems to be an especially nice one, because it allows me to think about the UI in a component-oriented way (similar to Java's Swing), making me forget the statelessness of web browsers.
Look at the example(s) to see how easy it is to use Webby!
In order to learn about the concepts used in Webby, see the description of concepts.