I’m attending some tech conferences in the Java space for several years now; for the last years I’m trying to push JCR, Apache Jackrabbit, and Apache Sling at various occasions – mostly through several talks. It seems to me that there is a change/increase in interest for these topics.
While two years ago, people have not been really that interested in JCR and usually asked questions along the line of “why should i use this? I have a database, it works fine” etc., this has definitly changed now. There are more and more people interested in alternatives to a POD (plain old database). It seems to me that the pain with traditional dbs is now too much and they’re searching for nosql solutions. Don’t get me wrong, JCR is not the golden hammer for data storage – there are valid use cases for PODs, but there are also many use cases where an alternative like JCR is much better suited.
Today people ask questions like “I looked at jcr, I have this problem, and I think I could do it this way. What do you think?” and of course variations on this theme.
I don’t think that this is motivated through the NOSQL hype, I ratherthink that this is a parallel movement which has the same origin. In addition, these people seems to know a lot about Apache Jackrabbit and usually ask deep going questions. As I’m not working on Jackrabbit itself – I’m a user of Jackrabbit – these questions usually give me a hard time 🙂
While I have a hard time with Jackrabbit questions, people seem often to have a hard time understanding the needs for Apache Sling. For one this might be cause they are still living in their POD driven world and know how to handle applications based on databases. Building applications on top of NOSQL solutions is a slightly different thing. When it comes to Apache Sling which is a web framework, it is immediately compared against web application frameworks with all the nice ui features, widget libraries and whatnot. And as Sling does not provide a UI library it is often immediately discarded.
But on the bright side as soon as people realize that they need something like JCR and now need a way to get all this content stored in the repository out to the users in a nice, elegant and flexible way, they also realize that Apache Sling helps a lot.
So my hope is that the adaption of JCR is increasing (and I think that is already the case) and that this drives the adoption of Apache Sling as well 🙂
And of course we are not day dreaming in Apache Sling – we will continue it’s development and add missing pieces or provide bridges etc.