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 started as an internal project at Day Software, and has been contributed to the Apache Incubator in September 2007. It can be considered an important part of Day's software stack, and was open-sourced to make the technical innovations contained therein available to the public.

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. Day's website runs on CQ5/Sling as well.

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

Tuberculosis Project

The TB project is developed by Tibtec, a nonprofit technology center based in Dharamsala (India) that helps the Tibetan community in harnessing modern technologies to help the community. The aim of the project is to build a system to monitor the tuberculosis among tibetan communities in India, Nepal and Bhutan. Thanks to technology advances in mobile and web computing, it is now possible to design a recording and reporting web portal supporting the WHO DOTS protocol.

The project of monitoring the tuberculosis among tibetan communities in India was born 1 year ago thanks to four actors: the DoH (Department of Health, Tibetan Government in Exile), Tibetan Delek Hospital (Gangchen Kyishong - India), AISPO (Italian Association for Solidarity Of Persons), and the Johns Hopkins University (USA). TibTec is working on a system for the above four actors to monitor TB in the Tibetan communities living in India, Nepal and Bhutan.

The main goal of the project is to build a simple, low-cost and versatile framework so that communities all over the world could benefit from it. The system could be easily customized for other works as well since it based on open source software.

There was a need to put in place a centralized solution (web portal) with mobile data gathering (SMS) to understand and fight with more efficiency against tuberculosis. The system also provides an information platform with data analysis and management for medical staff and health workers. The system is capable to cope with electricity power cuts and IP network inaccessibility. Finally, a reminder system for taking drugs and/or coming to visit doctors is available.

Technically, the solution consists in the implementation of a remote repository that stores data related to the project (e.g. Doctors, Patient records, DOTS reports, etc.) and which is accessible via a mobile gateway (android-based) that send HTTP POST/GET requests to a RESTfull API of a web framework (Apache Sling).

The system also implements Sling accessors to this remote repository: a server for analyzing SMS running on an android phone and a website built with a combination of server-side scripts in JSP and client-side script in Javascript. Finally, the reminder service for patients is managed thanks to the Google Agenda reminders service that send reminders on phones at a special date and hour through a gateway running on the android server to patients mobile phone.

Idium Web

Norwegian CMS vendor Idium is using Apache Sling for its Idium Web product. The product, available as a subscription service only, is aimed towards small businesses, who need a simple way of setting up and managing their website.

The product uses Sling and Dojo to create a very rich drag-and-drop interface, where the user drags elements onto a webpage. Elements can be text, image galleries, Google maps or other multimedia. The system also creates graphics and CSS dynamically, in order to provide consistent color and design schemes, while being fully configurable.

Upon establishing this project, Idium evaluated several server-side frameworks. Sling was chosen for its RESTful interface to a hierarchy repository, which proved to be a very good match for a web-based CMS.

License: SaaS only