SiteMesh was originally written about 5 years ago, after Joe Walnes downloaded the first sun servlet engine and wrote it using servlet chains (before filters).
He had been using it internally for about 2 years and by the time it was open sourced it was quite mature. Over the years, the basic design remained the same; content was intercepted, parsed, a decorator mapper was used to find a decorator and they were merged together.
There were 2 main leaps that helped make it successful - the rewrite from servlet-chain to servlet-filter when the first draft of the Servlet 2.3 API came out and Victor Salaman rewriting the parser to make it about 12 times faster. In December 2003, Chris Miller improved the parser to make it again 6 times faster and further minimize memory usage.
The following companies use (develop J2EE applications using) SiteMesh:
The following sites use SiteMesh:
Are you using Sitemesh? Please let us know, so that we can include you in this list!