First of all - Happy new year to all of you from my side :) The last days I had the chance to think a bit abou what happend in the last year and what I expect and/or wish for the next year. Since I feel pretty connected to Apache Sling this also did involve thinking about the project from my personal point of view. I'm sharing those thoughts since I do hope to hear your point of view as well and we can push Sling even further as community.
The year 2013 ------------- At adaptTo() 2013 Mike and Carsten already did summarize the major technical changes that where adressed until then. By revisiting the releases of last year it looks to me Sling made a big step forward improving in various areas like administration/maintenance (e.g. healthcheck and JMX improvements, Backlog integration), interoperability (e.g. full CRUD support, Oak Support, Cassandra ResourceResolver, Access Gates) as well as a lot of little but important updates of the existing functionality. Especially in the last two months there is a lot of movement in the community and a lot of discussions are still open. This kind of constructive discussion with partially opposing opinions as well as even concurrent implementationproposals are in my eyes a sign of a vivid community. 2014 - a whishlist ------------------ This is not a real whishlist but a list of topics that where recently discussed and some arguments why I personally think it might be worth to invest some time: - DevOps optimization: this includes setup, patching, monitoring and scalling of installations. Ian did start a corresponding thread in November and I hope this discussion will be pickedup to really fulfill the promise of a horizontally scallable solution not just on paper but in an administrable way (addressing secondary items like timing issues for deployments) - Subtopic Deployments: It is still not clear how to package deployments the right way, although various mechanisms are available it seems like there still is room for optimization - POST Servlet: this is an area that I have on my list since last year and where I started to work on a proposal for a new version that hopefully can be a base for something that replaces the old POST Servlet and reduces the need for implementing custom Servlets as much as possible - Feature Flags: although the "Feature of Features" seams close to be ready as first draft there is a lot of work left. One thing not discussed yet is the usage of featureflags for functionality of Sling itself (tailoring sling instances to the real needs by deactivating all unused features). - Multi-Tenant Applications: Although the tenant API does help to implement multi tenant applications there is still some unleashed potential. E.g. I am thinking of tenantspecific applicationextentions (might be possible that featureflags could help here). - Documentation: This is nothing new and although it recently wasn't topic on the mailinglist this topic gets more and more important. Everytime I try to onboard a new dev on Slingbased projects I realize there is more and more of functionality and it gets harder and harder to teach all relevant information without having the dev lost in the middle. The golden goal would be a book covering all the stable parts of sling. IMHO it is essential for the success of Sling in the next years to flatten the learningcurve. This list ist far from complete but those are the topics that I did think about when thinking about last year. All in all I think the Sling Community is in a great condition and I can't wait to see more solutions on top of Apache Sling. So in the end there is the questions: What are the topics you think need more/most attention of the community? Best regards Dominik
