Who is using Sling ?

Although Sling is a relatively young project, only recently graduated from the incubator, it already has a growing following of adopters. This page lists those adopters (or at least those that agree to be listed).

Being on the community wiki, if you are using Sling and your not listed here, please add yourself with a brief description of your project and how you have adopted Sling.

Adopters

Sakai Project (http://www.sakaiproject.org )

The Sakai project is a project that was started in 2004 funded by a research grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Its aim was to create an open source collaborative environment to support teaching and learning and research within Higher Education. The initial project members were Stanford University, University of Michigan, Indiana University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These four were rapidly joined my many other institutions growing to over 160 Universities running Sakai in production today. The project funding has come to an end and sustainability has been achieved as a result of community contributions.

The University of Cambridge (UK) was one of the early adopters and rapidly became involved in shaping the core of Sakai. In early 2008, shortly after Google made its OpenSocial announcement a decision was made to re-architect Sakai to be more user focused and socially aware, building on the collaborative experiences seen in networks like Ning and Facebook. After a period of evaluation Sakai chose Sling as its core technology partly because it had the solid backing of the Apache Foundation, but also because it was based on OSGi for componentised development, solid REST semantics and a solid JCR production backend in Apache Jackrabbit.

This adoption has had a huge impact on the Sakai code base. Although the core development is not complete, Sakai's line count has dropped from about 1.8M lines of code to about 200K as Sling has replaced many of modules that satisfied the Enterprise Content Management use cases. As a result, the code quality, scalability and performance have all risen whilst the memory footprint of production JVM's has halved. Perhaps the most startling impact has been the new ease with which UX designers and UI developers are able to work with the framework, where previously the Java web environment had precluded a UX/UI driven rapid development cycle.

Sakai 3 based on Sling will be going into production at the University of Cambridge by December 2009, with a number of other early adopters. For more information see an early screencast or look at the project site (frontend, backend) or live demo

License: ECL2/Apache2

Day (http://www.day.com)

Sling powers Day's entire CQ5 family of content management products (Web Content Management, Social Collaboration, Digital Asset Management), and is included in Day's CRX content repository, which is itself based on Jackrabbit.

Quite a few high profile mission critical websites are powered by CQ5 - Day's customer list mentions some of them.

CQ5 has been very well received by the press and by analysts, and Sling has played a major part in this success, by enabling the CQ5 development team to create robust and higly modularized software very efficiently.

License: Commercial product