Hi, I just opened a major improvement request, JCR-642 "Support flat content hierarchies". I'd like to use the issue as the focus point for building a roadmap for and eventually implementing the changes necessary to get rid of the current limitations against flat content structures.
There is no reason why a JCR content repository should not be able to store flat content, and there are a number of applications where the inherent content structure is indeed flat. Thus I think this is an important issue to discuss and resolve. The main problem with resolving the issue is the current design and assumptions around the NodeState class. Much of the Jackrabbit core implicitly assumes that the list of child nodes is always readily available as a part of the NodeState instance. I don't think that there's an easy or fast solution to this issue, so for now I think it's enough to just start paying attention to this issue and perhaps record potential concerns in JCR-642 whenever you come across them in the core codebase. BR, Jukka Zitting
