Paving the way to a native Sling

In the last two years, we presented our experimental work that enables developers to precompile scripts to allow them to build Sling applications that are compiled ahead-of-time.

Our saga continues: since the last adaptTo() we made several improvements to make this idea a reality, including:

• Support for any Sling-supported Script Engine
• Support for precompiled units in the JSP Script Engine
• Support for both versioned and non-versioned resource types
• Support for servlet resolution based on the current resource and path, so that language-specific features like data-sly-include and sling:call work just as before

We actively worked on reducing the migration efforts required to take advantage of the Apache Sling Scripting Bundle Tracker, allowing it to work in existing projects.

In this talk, we will show our progress and demonstrate how you can adapt your existing projects with minimal effort. As an example, we have converted the Sling Starter application, including the Composum content browser, to perform rendering with precompiled scripts.

Finally, we will provide an outlook on how this paves the way for a future natively compiled Sling, that will help make applications more cloud-friendly.