Dear Cocooners,
I've just started to take a look at the JCR (a.k.a. JSR-170) Reference Implementation from Slide, after having read the latest JSR draft, and I feel like exploring the possibilities of its usage inside Cocoon.
First thing I tried to do is an implementation of the o.a.c.components.repository.Repository, but then I started to think that it didn't make much sense. Our Repository interface is meant to provide a virtual repository API on top of different implementations (only a WebDAV impl. is available at the moment). But isn't this just what JCR is about? Wouldn't it be better if we dropped our own Repository and adopted the JCR APIs?
I thought about that as well (don't reinvent the wheel). However I came to the conclusion that I currently don't care about JCR as much as I care about WebDAV :-) The JCR RI for sure is not (yet) as tested and proven as Slide's WebDAV library and currently I have doubts that JCR is the best "API for WebDAV" (sigh, time will tell).
In addition I still think there is space for a more "user-oriented" API that works on a higher abstraction and is geared towards usage within Cocoon. I'm still planning to work on that (reworking o.a.c.components.repository.Repository (especially the exception handling ;-) and having another more "user-level" component operating on top of it) but I'm currently completely swamped :-(
However I would be looking forward to have some JCR support/sample within Cocoon.
Guido
We already have a WebDAV and a local filesystem implementation available in the RI (plus an implementation on top of a "virtual filesystem" which I haven't grokked yet). Of course, nothing prevents us from wrapping a JCR repo inside an Avalon component, if we want.
Then I thought about doing a Generator that could stream the XML representation of a JCR repo provided by the API. Should be a piece of cake as there's a method that streams it to a ContentHandler.
In order to show off what can be done with Cocoon+JCR, we could try to clone the Web frontend distributed by Day at http://jsr170tools.day.com or some part of it.
Thoughts? Questions? Volunteers?
Ugo
