netzooid

Now that Galaxy is announced, I can unleash my fury of blogging again. Or, as we all know will probably happen, I can blog just slightly less sporadically again.

One of the recent posts I’ve wanted to comment on is Atom is the New JCR (prompted by Sam Ruby). Adrian Sutton writes:

When the Java Content Repository (JCR) standard first came out it was supposed to bring in a new era of compatibility between content repositories and put an end to the content silo. There was, and still is, a lot of talk about it and just about everyone added JCR compliance to their marketing materials. Unfortunately, that’s mostly where things stopped - the implementation work that followed was generally done was buggy or incomplete and the only viable JCR implementations that I’ve seen have come out of Day Software, who lead the JCR spec effort.

We use JCR inside Galaxy for all our storage needs at the moment. Using it has been an interesting experience to say the least. One of my favorite “features” of JCR has been the fact that you can not have two seperate threads create a child node with the same name at the same time. Which means in our activity log, we can’t add two nodes called “/activity” to “/activities” at the same time.
The main reason we decided to go with JCR is that it supports both simple database type data and file type data via the same interface transparently. I’m not 100% sure it was the right choice though. I had to write an ORM like framework as the one in Jackrabbit seemed pretty immature and I didn’t have time to delve into the rabbit hole of the jcr-mapping module in Jackrabbit. Mine is limited but as least I could figure out how to use it. We’ll be reevaluating this for the future though now that Jackrabbit 1.4 is nearly out.

Adrian continues:

Then along came Atom which is all about remote access and manipulation of data and missing probably 90% of the functionality that JCR offers. It really isn’t a competitor to JCR at all and yet it’s doing more to break down content silos than JCR ever has. Atom support isn’t just being added to the marketing materials, it’s actually shipping and is usable in a lot of places - IBM’s Lotus Connections has Atom APIs to everything and, as best I can tell, only Atom APIs to it’s repository.

I completely agree that JCR isn’t very worthwhile as something that will break down content silos. It does have value as an API to work with data though. Atom is quite limited in the granularity it can work with data (which coincidentally is one of the reasons Web3S exists as well). And you still need to store your data somewhere.

Atom has not replaced JCR it has supplemented it. We use JCR as a content store for Galaxy. I’ve also written a generic JCR content store for AtomPub inside of Abdera. Sure, the vendor promises are probably wrong about the content-silos, but it sure simplifies some things when writing applications - which is what really counts!

Update: David Nuescheler has written a great follow up to this whole discussion.

Also, Jackrabbit 1.4 is out. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 8:46 pm and is filed under AtomPub, Javercising, REST, Random, Tech Ramblings.