fmeschbe's blog

Bringing Back the Fun Apache Sling brings back the fun to Java developers and makes the life of a web developer much easier. It combines current state of the art technologies and methods like OSGi, REST, scripting, and JCR. The main focus of Sling deals with the important task of bringing your content into the web and providing a platform to manage/update the content in a REST style. Sling is built as OSGi bundles and therefore benefits from all advantages of OSGi. On the development side a scripting layer (leveraging the Java Scripting API) allows to use any scripting language with Sling (of course you can use plain old Java, too). And on top of this, Sling helps in developing an application in a RESTful way. As the first web framework dedicated to JSR-283 Java Content Repositories, Sling makes it very simple to implement simple applications, while providing an enterprise-level framework for more complex applications. Underneath the covers Apache Jackrabbit is used for the repository ...

At times you want (or need) to include third party libraries in your bundles. You basically have two options to do that: Embed the complete library Inline the required classes/packages (or everything) Until recently I was in the camp of embedding the complete libraries and setting the Bundle-ClassPath manifest header accordingly. The Embed-Dependency directive of the Apache Felix Maven Bundle Plugin makes this extremely easy to do. Lately, though, this has been questioned by Karl Paul's pojosr project. This project brings the OSGi Service Registry to regular applications. The nice thing here is, that it really is a stripped down OSGi Framework basically removing the modularity pillar. The drawback is that this causes the Bundle-ClassPath manifest header and embeddeded libraries to not be supported. Thus to run your regular bundle inside pojosr, you will have to inline all third party libraries instead of embedding them. The upside is that this really works. For example the Apac...