Bertrand Delacretaz is preparing an "Illustrated History of Apache Sling" talk for https://adapt.to/2025/

I'm creating this page to collect material: photos, videos, stories, anecdotes, links that help explain how and why Sling became what it is.

All contributions will be duly credited in the presentation!

My draft outline includes

  • A timeline from Sling's Incubator proposal to today
  • How very extensive testing helped ensure Sling's quality, with examples of how tests evolved over time
  • The Microsling story, how creating minimal working code helped agree on renaming things
  • How the ASF's governance helped get quality both in the code and in the community
  • "Nobody's perfect" stories, like the security bug that was found about five years after being written

Your contributions

Feel free to add pictures, stories, links to videos, blog posts etc. here.

Indicate your name to that I can credit you in the presentation - otherwise I'll use the wiki version history, or indicate below if you want to stay anonymous.

Statistics

If people have metrics like how many requests have been processed by Sling code in their services over time, that'd be great.

Microsling blog post form October 2007

https://grep.codeconsult.ch/2007/10/12/microsling-yet-another-cool-web-applications-framework/ - this was the very beginning of "modern" Sling.

The code is at https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/sling/whiteboard/microsling/

Fifth price at JAX innovation award, 2008

https://grep.codeconsult.ch/2008/04/28/apache-sling-wins-prize-at-jax-innovation-award/

Carsten & Felix, happy!

Sling elevator pitch from 2009

https://grep.codeconsult.ch/2009/01/31/sling-restful-scripting-elevator-pitch/

Rapid JCR application development with Apache Sling, 2009

https://grep.codeconsult.ch/2008/09/24/sling-at-openexpoch-thats-tomorrow/

Understanding the Apache Sling Script Resolution

Source: https://satishkchoudhary.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/apache-sling-resolution-1536x1097.png

Does someone remember who created this diagram? Lars Trieloff maybe?

Who remembers Sightly?

Source: https://sourcedcode.com/storage/2022/09/what-version-sightly-apache-sling-scripting-htl-engineis-my-aem-using-FEATURED-600x329.jpg

Ten Years of Apache Sling

At adaptTo, September 2019.

Everybody sings "happy birthday" in their own language.

→ additional photos: https://adapt.to/2019/conference/gallery/celebrating-apache-sling-10-years

Paranoid testing

You'll actually find the word "paranoid" in some of our tests.

Being slightly paranoid has helped get a very solid set of automated tests, along with "multi-angles" testing where we didn't care much about duplicated test coverage between unit and integration tests. That's more tests to maintain than strictly needed, but they also often help explain how things work.

Good Naming is very important

Over the years, we've spent a lot of energy in the Sling community for finding good names for the things that we create.

I think this helps tremendously in keeping things understandable and precise, so it was definitely worth it, even if asynchronous naming discussions in email and similar channels can be painful.

A recent example is https://github.com/apache/sling-org-apache-sling-servlets-resolver/pull/60 where Konrad and myself discuss the naming of the IgnoredServletResourcePredicate.

First website

Maybe there is something in https://web.archive.org/web/20090704120420/http://sling.apache.org/site/index.html to highlight. Didn't yet do a deep dive and this first version looks suprisingly not too much different than what we have today (at least design-wise)

First adaptTo

Maybe something to tell from https://adapt.to/2011/: https://adapt.to/2011/schedule/the-future-of-apache-sling

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