Content Management with
Apache Jackrabbit
Jukka Zitting
Day Software
(862)
2
Overview
What to expect What not to expect
> Apache Jackrabbit > Source code
> JCR content modeling > Live demo
> Best practices > Business perspective
> Things to watch for > Management perspective
> Engineering perspective
3
Agenda
> Apache Jackrabbit
> Basic content modeling
> References and search
> Advanced features
> Summary and questions
4
Apache Jackrabbit
> JSR 170 reference implementation
> Apache TLP since 2006
> Looking back
– 1.0: April 2006
– 1.1: October 2006
– 1.2: January 2007
– 1.3: April 2007
> Looking forward (tentative)
– 1.4: 2007
– 2.0: 2008 (JCR 2.0 RI)
– announce-subscribe@jackrabbit.apache.org
> Components
– Core, API, RMI, WebDAV, webapp, JCA, … http://jackrabbit.apache.org/
5
Apache Jackrabbit: Words of advice
> Read (or browse) the JCR specification
– jcr-1.0.jar included
> Getting started with Jackrabbit
– jackrabbit-webapp: Drop-in deployment
– First Hops: Embedded repository
– Take your time
> Resources
– Mailing lists: Excellent support, but may delay you
– Website: Some good parts, but not complete or very well structured
– Wiki: End user experience (especially for JBoss)
– FAQ: outdated
– Issue tracker: Good response time
6
Agenda
> Apache Jackrabbit
> Basic content modeling
> References and search
> Advanced features
> Summary and questions
7
Introducing JCR Tunes
> JCR example application
– “How to implement a music store or library with JCR?”
– Designed to showcase JCR features and best practices
– JCR book in progress
> Store and manage individual “tunes”, optionally organized in albums, etc.
> Support alternative views like predefined genres, or more ad-hoc searches
> Integrated handling of reviews, cover images, and other related content
> Staged publishing and timed releases of tunes or albums
> Personalization for things like settings, favorites, personal play-lists, etc.
> Extensibility and flexibility
8
Starting point: Leverage the standard node types
Type hierarchy Content hierarchy
nt:hierarchyNode
nt:folder
nt:file
nt:linkedFile
nt:resource
9
Bottom-up modeling: Content types
my:album > nt:folder
- artist (string)
my:review > nt:file
- release date (date)
- author (string)
- star rating (long)
my:tune > nt:file
- artist (string)
- release date (date)
my:resource > nt:resource
- codec (string)
- bitrate (long)
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Top-down modeling: Content hierarchies
Label Label
Band Label
Album Album Band
Reviews Tune Tune Images Tune
Reviews Images
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Content Modeling: Words of advice
> Namespaces
– Use a single namespace per company or application
– Use a reasonably unique namespace prefix
– Prefixed names for structured content
– Default namespace for unstructured content
> Use an application root node, /my:content
– Good for searching, backup, and migration
> Avoid flat hierarchies
– User interface complexity
– Jackrabbit performance
> Content-driven design
– Design your content before your application
12
Agenda
> Apache Jackrabbit
> Basic content modeling
> References and search
> Advanced features
> Summary and questions
13
Alternative Views: References
tags tunes playlists
Rock Classic Tune Top 10 Picks
Tune link link link
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Alternative Views: Search
Looking for XPath SQL
Latest /jcr:root/my:tunes//element(*,my:tune) SELECT * FROM my:tune
releases [@released > xs:dateTime(‘…’)] WHERE
jcr:path LIKE ‘/my:tunes/%’
AND released > DATE ‘…’
Reviews /jcr:root/my:tunes//element(*,my:review) SELECT * FROM my:review
with /jcr:content[jcr:contains(.,’…’)] WHERE
keywords
jcr:path LIKE ‘/my:tunes/%’
AND CONTAINS(*,‘…’)
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Alternative Views: Words of advice
> Moderate use of references
– Circular references only within a subtree
– Plan for backup and content migration
– Jackrabbit performance: max 10k references to a single node
> Best search performance when selecting a small subset of content
> No joins or aggregate searches
> Full text indexing of binary properties only for jcr:data in nt:resource nodes
> Formatting date queries
– ISO 8601 as the string format
– session.getValueFactory().createValue(Calendar.getInstance()).getString()
> JCR 2.0: Query Object Model? Mandatory SQL?
16
Agenda
> Apache Jackrabbit
> Basic content modeling
> References and search
> Advanced features
> Summary and questions
17
Staged Publishing: Versioning
Version store
Staging Live
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Personalization
tunes users
Tune John Jane
Tune tunes favorites playlists
link link
19
Authentication and Authorization
> Java Authentication and Authorization Services (JAAS)
– Mostly the authentication part is currently used by Jackrabbit
– Pluggable authentication components
– Support for single sing-on
> Custom AccessManager interface in Jackrabbit
– Pluggable authorization components
– The default implementation supports only global read, write, and admin
access
– More advanced implementations are proprietary
> Repository-level authentication and authorization applies to all clients
– Better than application-level authorization
20
Agenda
> Apache Jackrabbit
> Basic content modeling
> References and search
> Advanced features
> Summary and questions
21
Last words
> Everything is content
– Application content
– HTML pages, CSS and JavaScript files, static images
– JSP pages, Java classes and libraries
– Documentation, resource bundles, etc.
– With versioning, export/import, full text search, etc.
> Web-friendly
– Trivial URI mapping
– WebDAV access for free
– Dispatch on node type, not on URI path
> In your application?
Jukka Zitting http://www.day.com/
Day Software jukka.zitting@day.com
Apache Jackrabbit http://jackrabbit.apache.org/
users@jackrabbit.apache.org
Apache Software Foundation http://www.apache.org/
