Hi, I'll be doing an interview about Sling next Monday for https://feathercast.apache.org/ , with Rich Bowen from the ASF.
I enclose the planned questions along with my tentative answers. If someone has comments or complements they are welcome! -Bertrand ** feathercast questions *** Q: I read the description of your project from the website, but what does that actually mean? What does your project do? Who would use it? Sling is an extremely modular Java Web Framework, which dynamically selects scripts in various languages and Java Servlets to process HTTP requests. Its strong points are its flexibility, as it runs any scripting language that the Java Virtual Machine supports, its extreme modularity, based on the OSGi module system, and its code quality and stability. It's a very mature project, more than ten years old but still going strong with new modules and performance and functionality improvements being worked on all the time by roughly twenty active committers. Our more than 300 Git repositories were a bit scary for Apache Infra initially, but some of our community members helped create a few tools to manage them and that works very well. Big thanks to Apache Infra! Q: Tell us some user stories: Give us an example of people who are using $Project in the real world, and what kinds of problems they are solving with it. Sling powers some major content management products which run some of the largest websites on the planet. At my employer we are using it in many different contexts, from smaller on-premises systems to large cloud-based services. Seeing your code used in such contexts and service millions of requests is very gratifying. And helps explain to your family what it is that you actually do in these long hours in front of your computer ;-) Q: Name origin story? (If weird/interesting name.) >From the Sling website: The name "Sling" was proposed by Roy Fielding who explained it like this: [The name is] Biblical in nature. The story of David: the weapon he uses to slay the giant Goliath is a sling. Hence, it's our David's favorite weapon. [that's David Nuescheler, CTO of Day Software when that company donated the Sling codebase to Apache] It is also the simplest device for delivering content very fast ;-) Q: Recent releases/development/activity? Tons of them! A good portion of our more than 300 modules are evolving all the time with very frequent releases. reporter.apache.org outputs more than 1'300 lines for Sling since 2008, each line listing one or a few releases. 128 lines in 2019 and already 36 in 2020. We most often have a few module releases every week. Q: Where do you hang out? Where should I come to connect with you? Our main channel is the [email protected] mailing list Q: Where do I get more info? (This is where you advertise your website, mailing lists, and other online resources. Also promote upcoming events, if any.) sling.apache.org is the entry point for everything around SLing. The yearly adaptTo() conference is where many of us we gather for in-person technical exchange, the next one is in Berlin at the end of September, its website is at adapt.to
