When I quit my day job in the summer of 2006 to bring an idea of mine to life as an Internet startup, I was faced with a huge number of questions and not a lot of clear answers. The excitement of starting a new project was soon tempered by the difficulty of choosing among the dizzying array of possible technical platforms and solutions. While the shelves were full of books focusing on each of the components of a web application, what I really wanted was a look at how all the pieces fit together. Too often, I found books that seemed like annotated versions of Javadocs, with he- ful explanatory notes that setEnabled(boolean enabled) would set the enabled flag. At the other end of the spectrum were abstract architectural tracts that might have made for good reading but certainly didn?t give me a head start on the architecture. I wanted to see how these technologies worked when used for nontrivial applications; I wanted to see ugly problems and their solutions?I wanted a look at the source code of a modern web application.