[ANN] Apache Sling version 8 released

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

The Apache Sling team is pleased to announce the release of Apache
Sling version 8. The release is available for download at

    https://sling.apache.org/downloads.cgi

About Apache Sling
------------------
Apache Sling brings back the fun to Java developers and makes the life
of a web developer much easier. It combines current state of the art
technologies and methods like OSGi, REST, scripting, and JCR.

The main focus of Sling deals with the important task of bringing your
content into the web and providing a platform to manage/update the
content in a REST style.

Sling is built as OSGi bundles and therefore benefits from all
advantages of OSGi. On the development side a scripting layer
(leveraging the Java Scripting API) allows to use any scripting
language with Sling (of course you can use plain old Java, too). And on
top of this, Sling helps in developing an application in a RESTful way.

As the first web framework dedicated to JSR-283 Java Content
Repositories, Sling makes it very simple to implement simple
applications, while providing an enterprise-level framework for more
complex applications. Underneath the covers Apache Jackrabbit Oak is
used for the repository implementation.

Release notes
-------------

The major points of interest for this release are:

* Switched to Apache Jackrabbit Oak as the persistence engine
* Switched to the new provisioning model 
* Integrated support for the Sightly templating engine
* Added versioning support for the Resource API
* Improved testing tools
* Moved to Servlet API 3.0
* Performance improvements

The full release notes are available online at

    https://sling.apache.org/news/sling-launchpad-8-released.html

Enjoy!

On behalf of the the Apache Sling PMC,
Robert Munteanu