L.S.,
Ever since I first read about Sling on the Incubator website, it seemed
to have a lot of potential so I was eager to try it out. This post is
actually just a 'reality check' to make sure I'm getting what the
project is really about and that I'm using it in a 'right' way (if such
a thing would exist) ...
Over the last few days, I have been trying to build a small demo
application with the Launchpad. The application is a very lightweight
portal like solution, where pages consist of several blocks of related
information. I modeled the pages as nodes in the repository and all the
'portlets' on it as children of the page node. The page renders a
layout page with placeholders and some JavaScript will load the
'portlets' into their appropriate positions afterwards. It seems to be
very easy to develop this with Sling taking care of the presentation of
a single block and the possibility to store any kind of information in
the 'portlet' nodes. Is it a reasonable Sling use case though?
But now, I would like to add some dynamic content in there. One piece
of dynamic content is an RSS feed. At first, I was thinking of storing
the RSS url in the 'portlet' node and use JRuby or something to get the
data from the URL and transform it, but perhaps there is a better way to
make this kind of data available (e.g. to make every item in the RSS
feed a node of it's own) -- importing or mapping the data somehow.
Secondly, my solution is fine for serving a lot of content in an easy to
maintain way for most of the site (which is the same for all the users),
but I would also need some of the content to be available based on the
user role. There is no mention of authentication and authorisation on
the website and somewhere on the mailing list I read it is orthogonal to
Sling. Does this mean I'll have to make a simple web application to do
the authentication and embed Sling in there somewhere for the more
content-based aspects of the site?
Finally, something completely different... I'm spending some of my time
working on the Apache ServiceMix project and I also have a few customers
that I'm using it for. ServiceMix is an ESB solution, but it doesn't
have a good message archiving console (yet?). I was thinking to use
Sling for that as well. It should be possible to archive the message
exchanges (just an XML body and some header properties) in a JCR
repository and use ESPs of JRuby scripts to transform the message into
HTML for the end users to interact with. Given the fact that ServiceMix
is moving to OSGi as well for it's next major release (e.g. the
ServiceMix Kernel project), this seems like a very good match. Any
thoughts or suggestions on this use case?
Regards,
Gert
- Just a few questions... Gert Vanthienen
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