future of sling pipes

[Stefan Seifert <st...@diva-e.com>]

our sling pipes module [1][2] did not get much love in the last years and in its current state is no longer running with java 17 or java 21 (due to dependency to nashorn scripting engine), and it was also never added to sling starter. the dependencies are also quite outdated as well. carsten recently applied a security-related dependency update from a contribution.

if we are still willing to maintain it in the future, someone needs to invest some time esp. to look into the nashorn issue. can we migrate to a different scripting engine (or is the current architecture and pipes syntax closely tied to it?). or should we embed nashorn [3][4] into the bundle and live with it (at least nashorn has seen some releases in the last years)?

personally, i've never used sling pipes.

@nicholas: do you have some time to bring this module back live on modern JVMs? we should also add it to sling starter in that case.

stefan

[1] https://github.com/apache/sling-org-apache-sling-pipes
[2] https://sling.apache.org/documentation/bundles/sling-pipes.html

[3] https://github.com/openjdk/nashorn
[4] https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/openjdk/nashorn/nashorn-core/

Re: future of sling pipes

[Robert Munteanu <ro...@apache.org>]

On Wed, 2026-02-18 at 17:54 +0000, Stefan Seifert wrote:
> so I think it's too early to just deprecate it - embedding nashorn
> scripting engine might be the easiest way out to make it compatible
> at least and get it usable for those still using it.

FWIW, I pushed a sample that embeds the nashorn engine some time ago.

https://github.com/apache/sling-samples/tree/master/nashorn-external

Robert

RE: future of sling pipes

[Stefan Seifert <st...@diva-e.com>]

> as you probably have noticed, i'm not contributing a lot for the last 2
> years. Unfortunately my work took me to another place with other coding
> priorities, and i don't even do java anymore. I won't have time to work on
> that module, and if not used, i guess i'm fine EOLing it.

i was also wondering why no one has complained yet that pipes is not running with java 17+, that's a least a sign that not much people have it still in their projects. looking at the maven central download statistics for org.apache.sling.pipes, there is still a download frequency of 2000-3000 downloads per month.

so I think it's too early to just deprecate it - embedding nashorn scripting engine might be the easiest way out to make it compatible at least and get it usable for those still using it.

let's see if we get other opinions as well.

stefan

Re: future of sling pipes

[Nicolas Peltier <np...@apache.org>]

Hey Stefan,

as you probably have noticed, i'm not contributing a lot for the last 2
years. Unfortunately my work took me to another place with other coding
priorities, and i don't even do java anymore. I won't have time to work on
that module, and if not used, i guess i'm fine EOLing it.

Is there a ceremony or something ;) ?

Nicolas

Le mer. 18 févr. 2026 à 11:42, Stefan Seifert <st...@diva-e.com> a
écrit :

> our sling pipes module [1][2] did not get much love in the last years and
> in its current state is no longer running with java 17 or java 21 (due to
> dependency to nashorn scripting engine), and it was also never added to
> sling starter. the dependencies are also quite outdated as well. carsten
> recently applied a security-related dependency update from a contribution.
>
> if we are still willing to maintain it in the future, someone needs to
> invest some time esp. to look into the nashorn issue. can we migrate to a
> different scripting engine (or is the current architecture and pipes syntax
> closely tied to it?). or should we embed nashorn [3][4] into the bundle and
> live with it (at least nashorn has seen some releases in the last years)?
>
> personally, i've never used sling pipes.
>
> @nicholas: do you have some time to bring this module back live on modern
> JVMs? we should also add it to sling starter in that case.
>
> stefan
>
> [1] https://github.com/apache/sling-org-apache-sling-pipes
> [2] https://sling.apache.org/documentation/bundles/sling-pipes.html
>
> [3] https://github.com/openjdk/nashorn
> [4] https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/openjdk/nashorn/nashorn-core/
>