Hi to all, and a great new (not so much now... :-) ) year to all Sling-ers in the world! :-D Note: after writing the mail i noted that it was too long, so i divided it in two parts: the first is just an introduction (ok, a loong introduction... but i had to write it!): jump it if you are not interested in my general propositions for a Slinged 2010... :-D
-- 1 -- I'm developing a fully-modifiable site (a sort of customized cms..) and i'm obviously enjoying a lot the beautiful features of Sling... I'm a Java (M-S-EE) programmer, but when i started to discover Sling (two months ago) i had absolutely no experience with Sling and its background technologies (jcr, osgi, maven), so i think to be a good "target" to test documentation-related aspects from a "totally beginner" point of view... I really love Sling and i would like to give all contributes i can, so i would like to share all my sling-related work, mainly: - give feedback, collect and share common problems, from a beginner point of view (that is, the point of view of a developer who wants to build it's first web-site using Sling but is still in a pre-jcr state... :-)). I worked around some little difficult, and i still have several questions to ask, just because most of the documentation (obviously) assumes that the developer already knows the thecnologies Sling uses: i would like to collect them and write a tutorial targeted to developers like me, without experience with the Sling technologies, just to help the widespreed Sling MUST have... (this tutorial would concern commmon aspects a beginner must address, like dbms configuration, services registration and so on...). - clean and release sources of my little cms: it has the power to build a whole localized, fully-modular site by simply defining two html files (view and edit mode) for the site-structure and for every module one wants to use in the site (ex: an image gallery, a text paragraph with an image, ecc.). All the site is then completely buildable and editable from the web interface (pages and menu items can be added and managed thanks to a sitemap page, modules in each page can be managed with their own edit-mode file)... The project can localize each content (not just the scripts) and uses ajax to inject modules in pages; it also includes some javascript (pure native js, no js framework required) and java (& esp..) utility code to access main sling functions. I know it's not immediate to describe it in a few lines, but i think it can be a good starting point to understand Sling features (coupled with the tutorial, i hope it can help Sling beginners to rapidly understand and use the main Sling concepts...); and obviously it's also a start-point to build a full Sling site with a very small learning curve, just to enter the Sling world (knowing html and the few helper ECMA functions is enough to build a complete custom site)... The project is now functional and ready to use, but i would like to clean it (the code is now a bit confused...) and to complete it with several useful Sling features i just skipped at the moment (because i'm still a Sling beginner too, and i had some difficulty to use them).... -- 2 -- In reference to the FAQ "How do I render a script for a star "*" resource?": i modified just a bit the path-based-rtp, to provide the resource type ONLY in the case of star resources: from my point of view, it's a natural behaviour to infer the type of a star resource from the request path, so that the problem accessed by the FAQ simply disappears... i used this modified version in my project and all works fine (without interferences with resources that already have their resource-type)... So this is only a feedback: i think this approach can be generally useful (maybe in the most general form to provide a resource path ALWAYS, if the addressed resource hasn't its own...), as the default Sling behaviour or as a bundle ready to activate (in the Sling bundle repository)... is it right? Or there is a conceptual error in my vision? I would like to ask several questions to the mailing list in the next days (i collected and tried to resolve them along my development, but they are still in my TO-DO list... :-) )... my willing is to reorder and share the informations i will receive, writing the tutorial i mentioned above (in the loong introduction part)... What is the best way to ask several questions to the list? Have i to collect them and write a single mail, or it's better to write a separate mail per question? A big greeting to you all, thanks for your patience, Fabris
