LOGIN | REGISTER NOW | SUBSCRIBE
 
 
News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>


   

 
 
Download Current Issue
ISSUE 3/15/2010 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?


 
blogs tab
Google Code turns 5
Google Code Turns 5, and adds a Paxos Algorithm to make the system more stable and reliable.
03/17/2010 11:16 AM EST

Test your Visual Studio 2010 know-how
Microsoft is offering free beta certification exams for Visual Studio 2010.
03/17/2010 11:08 AM EST

Microsoft lifts the hood on IE9
Microsoft is previewing IE9.
03/16/2010 01:10 PM EST

 

Events calendar tab
EclipseCon
3/22/2010 to 3/25/2010
Santa Clara, Calif.
The Eclipse Foundation

DevConnections
4/12/2010 to 4/14/2010
Las Vegas
Penton Media

MySQL Conf. and Expo
4/12/2010 to 4/15/2010
Santa Clara, Calif.
O'Reilly Media

High Performance Computing Linux Financial Markets
4/19/2010
New York City
Flagg Management

Informix User Conf.
4/25/2010 to 4/28/2010
Overland Park, Kans.
IIUG


 
print Printable version 
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Mono brings .NET to Android
At Microsoft MIX, Mono will unveil the ability to port .NET applications to the Android op...

IBM brings Rational tools into the cloud
Fifteen Rational products for managing, developing and testing on clouds are now available...

Going 'all in' on .NET as default runtime
Programmers for Windows Phone 7 will need to use Silverlight and XNA for development

Digg!  Digg
Reddit  Reddit
Slashdot  Slashdot
Share on facebook  Facebook
Share on Twitter  Twitter

Apache Sling gives a hand to Web devs facing huge projects


By Alex Handy
May 14, 2009 — 
Web development can bury a team under mountains of HTML files, images, and non-development-related documents from marketing and management. Two years ago, as a way for Java developers to handle all that new “content,” the Apache Sling project began. Yesterday, the second release of this Java Content Repository (JCR) access framework was released within the Apache Foundation's incubator.

Carsten Ziegeler, a committer on the project, explained, “Without Sling, it is often very time-consuming to develop large websites with thousands of pages and even more content snippets displayed throughout the site. Therefore, we started to develop a platform for our content-based products, which enables the rapid and elegant development of content-based applications.

"Sling uses a Java Content Repository as the back-end store for all information. One of the major goals is to have a modular, scalable, extensible and flexible platform, which is also manageable. Therefore we choose OSGi as the underlying platform."

Day Software, the company behind much of the work on Apache Sling, started on this path toward a development environment focused on JSR-170 (Java Content Repositories), when its current CTO, David Nuescheler, became specification lead on JSR-170 in 2002. The spec was finalized in 2005, and just under two years later, Nuescheler's coworkers began building the Apache Sling framework to manage connections between Java applications and their JSR-170-compliant JCRs.

The idea is to stick all that Web content in a simpler repository, rather than spreading it around the hard drive of each Web server. Thus, content developers can slot images, text and other items into the content repository, rather than trying to keep track of individual assets as they move through the many segments of a company. Because the JCR manages content in a manner similar to an SCM system, developers using Sling can quickly tie this information into portlets or beans.

At Switzerland-based Day Software, Felix Meschberger (who can be seen as the father of Sling), Bertrand Delacretaz and Ziegeler worked to build a new API for dealing with content repositories. Said Ziegeler: “While the original idea was to have a framework based on JCR, it took us some time (and several complete rewrites) to recognize that we shouldn't do that. [Rather, we should] base the whole framework on a more generic abstraction (which we call the resource API).

"Getting this API right, and providing enough functionality—but not too much—was the most tricky part. We spent nearly a year on this. But today we are very proud of this API as it makes Sling even more powerful and elegant."

This API layer allows developers to use scripting languages or straight Java to dictate the manner in which Web content is handled on its way to the client-side. Apache Sling is available for free from the Apache Foundation's website.


Related Search Term(s): Apache, Java


Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33486
 

Add comment


Name*
Email*  
Country     


  • Comment
  • Preview
Loading