Hello, as some of you might know, we at Adobe (and at Day Software before) developed quite some tooling around exporting, importing and syncing content from and to a JCR repository. The "checked-out" structure on the local filesystem also offers SVN-like operations, like update, checkin, status, etc., against the JCR repository. We called this system the "File Vault (vlt)". It uses the built-in JCR remoting of Jackrabbit to read and write the content.
We also used the same serialization format to implement our "Content Packages" which basically are a zip of such an exported structure, w/o all the meta information needed for syncing. This packaging system also comes with a HTTP service and UI that allows to actually manage those packages (create, update, install, uninstall, upload, etc). Additionally we also developed some maven plugins that allow building such content packages, controlling vlt (the command line tool) and deploying content packages into a running repository. Our R&D thinks that the Jackrabbit project would benefit from such tooling since nothing comparable is established today. We are now at a stage where we cleared all hurdles with Adobe Legal, and streamlined the codebase so that we are ready to contribute. All that's left to do from our side is to refactor the java package space and replace the copyrights. Once contributed, we will continue developing the tools, as we heavily use them in-house and also train our customers and partners on this technology. IMO, there is little risk, that the code gets orphaned. If the general consensus is that such a contribution is desired, I will prepare the final patch and offer it for contribution. The rough schedule is: May: prepare patch and offer contribution of vlt, packaging, maven plugins June: prepare patch and offer contribution of package manager and related maven plugins Along the same notes we also look into simplifying "vlt" as it is sometimes a bit tricky to use :-) This development will start after the contribution and we hope to have something usable by end of this year. Thank you. Regards, Toby