I just installed a nice little plugin that gives you “code” completition features for dependencies inside a maven pom. It lists you all available matching dependencies from a configurable repository. Great stuff.

Are you bored of using dumb stuff? Do you want to play with the cool guys and use the greatest and latest stuff in Java world?
Well, then we have a great news for you: just use Apache Sling and you’ll participate from this great new framework.
The idea and initial code has been developed at Day and the father of Sling is my collegue Felix Meschberger. We donated the project to Apache last year and since then Sling has become a very interesting and also exciting project.
With our new slogan “Bringing back the fun” (to Java development) we submitted Sling to the JAX Innovation Award and out of 40 submissions Sling has been nominated for the award (which means we reached the final with 9 other submissions). Yesterday was the great day where the winners of the Award have been announced and we were very surprised but definitly proud that Sling managed to win the 5th place in the competition!
It’s a little bit hard to explain very briefly what Sling is about. Sling is intended to bring the fun back (ok, I already mentioned this) and make the life of a web developer easier. It deals with the annoying task of bringing your content into the web and providing a plattform to manage/update the content. Underneath Sling makes use of a Java Content Repository (like Jackrabbit). Sling is built into OSGi bundles and therefore benefits from all advantages of OSGi. On the development side we integrated a scripting layer (using Apache BSF) which allows you to use any scripting language with Sling (of course you can use plain old Java, too).
That’s a very rough description, so check out our website.
Sling is currently in the Incubator and we’re looking for people who want to join the fun and make Sling even greater.

The photo shows two proud committers of Apache Sling: Felix Meschberger (on the right) and myself (on the left).

The next major version of Cocoon has been released – for now it’s only available as artifacts in the Maven repository – but this allows you already to directly start and use the latest and greatest of Cocoon.
There are many new and great things to check out and explore – so check out the website and the mailing lists. If you can’t find the right answers there don’t hesitate to bug us on the mailing lists!

I always wanted to blog about this: This is a big thank you to the Apache Commons team who directly picked up my innocent question if they could support OSGi in their upcomming releases and immediately added this to their projects. There are already some releases out, like commons-io and commons-lang, that you can directly deploy as a bundle.
This is great as this saves time and energy to all people using OSGi and commons projects – no wrapper bundles are needed anymore and you can directly use the released stuff.
So again, THANK YOU!

Next week I’ll be in Amsterdam for the ApacheCon EU 2008; there will be a lot of interesting stuff going on (as always at a ApacheCon). Apart from my JCR talk :), you should check out the hackathon where you can meet, talk and code with all the others, the Fast Feather track and the BOFs of course. These are great opportunities to get to know the Apache spirit 🙂 And of course there are plenty of good sessions and other activities!