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).