Time flies incredibly fast, and here we are at the last day of Day JCR Cup 08 submissions. There are still a few hours to send your submission (the deadline is today, 30 September 2008, at midnight Pacific Time), so please don't forget to send your Sling application before that.

If you happen to have heard about it only today, don't despair - with mere 15 minutes to create your first application you still have enough time to create something nice, and even have a couple of cups of coffee in between! Seriously though, if someone would be up to such a challenge, please let us know in the submission that you just started today.

Fingers crossed for your submissions.

Your Day JCR Cup 08 Team

Yesterday, Bertrand and I presented Sling at the OpenExpo in Winterthur. Although we had only 30 minutes for the whole presentation and started out from "what is JCR" we managed to do some live coding on stage. The example we had chosen was (again) a little blog, this time with some additional OSGi bundles though. The bundles could be installed by simply putting them in the JCR/WebDAV directory /apps/myblog/install. This is fabulous, because that allows Sling users to distribute one application as a content bundle (and not have to deal with separate packages that contain the OSGi bundles).

The example code is attached to a Sling Jira issue. I would like to get it commited as a Sling sample, but there is still some work to be done on it. In the mean time you can still get the code at Sling issue 673.

The presentation slides are here:

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As an old Rails fanboy I cannot resist to quote Renaud Richardet:

Sling is the coolest thing since I tried Ruby on Rails

Day has won the Swiss Open Source Award in the business category. The members of the jury explicitly mentioned our involvement in Apache Jackrabbit and Sling, especially the activity of Day's developers on the respective mailing lists. The winners of all categories received a golden keyboard. See here for more information about Day's open source activities.

Two happy bald guys from Day, a juror and a golden keyboard (from right to left: Day's senior developer Bertrand Delacretaz, jury member Christian Stocker and me)

There have been some bug fixes in Apache Sling since the last version of CRX Quickstart was released. In case you want to update CRX Quickstart with latest and greatest from Sling's svn here is a little how-to:

1. You need to have Maven installed.
2. Check out Sling from http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/sling/trunk
3. cd into launchpad/testing and execute "mvn install" (to skip the tests execute "mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true install" instead). If the build does not fail (which it could, this is the latest in trunk) there should be a new file org.apache.sling.launchpad.testing-4-incubator-SNAPSHOT.war (or similar) in launchpad/testing/target. This is your new war file.
   If you run out of memory while compiling increase Maven's memory setting by setting the environment variable MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx256M"
4. cd into jcr/jackrabbit-client and execute "mvn install" again. This will create a new bundle in jcr/jackrabbit-client/target.

When you ran CRX Quickstart it created a folder named crx-quickstart. You need to modify some files in this folder.

1. Make a backup of the crx-quickstart folder. If you need to keep your content also do an export (see http://localhost:7402/crx)
2. Delete crx-quickstart/launchpad
3. Replace crx-quickstart/server/webapps/crx-launchpad.war with the .war file created above (i.e. copy and rename the file to crx-launchpad.war).
4. Start CRX-QS and navigate your browser to http://localhost:7402/system/console/list (Sling's OSGi console). Uninstall the "Sling - Jackrabbit Embedded Repository" bundle. Install the bundle you created above.
5. Stop CRX and delete crx-quickstart/repository

That's all folks. This is all at your own risk and YMMV, of course.

Update (18/9/08): I missed some steps, unfortunately. Updated the post, thanks to Bertrand for pointing this out.

Sling commiter Bertrand Delacretaz will present Sling at the upcoming OpenExpo in Zurich (I shall be there to assist him with some on-stage coding). The event will take place 24/9 and 25/9 in Winterthur, admission is free.

As part of the event the winners of Swiss Open Source Award will be announced. Bertrand has been nominated for his work in open source initiatives as well as Day for our contributions to Apache Jackrabbit and Sling.

I find it remarkable that quite a number of other nominees are related to JCR (Magnolia, Michi Wechner, and the Alfresco customer canton of Vaud) or content management in general (a Plone integrator, the YMC CMS)

Today a broad group of document management vendors led by IBM, Microsoft and EMC announces their efforts of around a protocol specification for content management interoperability.

I would like to congratulate the group to all their efforts that has been put into this specification and we look very much forward to participate actively in the standardization process that hopefully will be kicked off soon.

I am excited that the ECM market has decided to start supporting a protocol specification, which was an often discussed gaping hole in the content management market (see here and here).

Having a protocol that functionally matches on a protocol level what JCR specifies on an API level for Java is an outstanding opportunity for the industry on its road to become truly relevant enterprise infrastructure and definitely validates all our standardization and infrastructure efforts we have been involved in over the past years. Thus, me and my colleagues at Day would be very happy to contribute our JCR and REST knowledge and experience to future versions of the specification.

Thanks and congratulations to Al Brown, Ethan Gur-esh and David Choy.

If you like Groovy as a scripting language have a look at Christian Sprecher's blog post on using the Groovy MarkupBuilder for Sling scripting. Sling does not come with Groovy by default (yet), because the Groovy engine is not available in a public Maven repository, but Christian has provided a JIRA issue that explains how to install it. Recent mails on Sling's mailing list suggest that there is indeed demand for Groovy on Sling.

I am happy to announce the launch of the shiny new discussion groups section of dev.day.com.

There is a long history of discussions about our products and the underlying technologie on various open mailing lists. For that reason we have implemented the discussion groups as a web frontend to the existing groups. That will give you a large and searchable collection of existing discussion threads in one place and not create another silo.

In case you are interested in the underlying technology: it's a Sling application running on CRX Quickstart. I am especially happy with the excellent performance of the full text search (try this one). It has been achieved without any optimizations or changes of the default settings.

One key lesson we learned in developing this app: take rule #2 of David's model seriously. The hierarchy was changed a number of times until it finally suited our needs.

I might sound a bit like a Javamagazin sales guy, but this month's Javamagazin again contains a very interesting article: Day's Carsten Ziegeler has written about Sling. Have a look, in case you speak German.

The abstract:

Apache Sling

Das Open-Source-Projekt Apache Sling ist nicht einfach nur ein weiteres Web-Framework. Es verknüpft bestehende State-of-the-Art-Paradigmen, Standards und Open-Source-Projekte und macht sie unkompliziert nutzbar.
Carsten Ziegeler

Moritz Havelock has started a new blog called "In the Sling" with tutorials on OSGi and Sling (CRX Quickstart, actually). The tutorials are easy to follow and the sources are included. Very nice!