Archive for October, 2006

Nuxeo is switching its ECM to Java, and we’re using JCR for our document storage. JCR (Java Content Repository, standardized by JSR-170 and the upcoming JSR-283) is a young specification with a promising future — but what’s its point, you may ask, as all existing content management systems are already storing content very well without it? Its goal is interoperability between vendors, which will make it possible for people who write applications needing to store content to have a unified API for such manipulations. All major content repository vendors are active in the JSR-283 expert group, and all are working on JCR bindings for their various proprietary repositories.

Of course a standardized and wildly successful way of manipulating content already existed before JCR: SQL. But SQL and JCR have a different focus:

• SQL is a language; it manipulates rows and is geared toward generic relation manipulation,
• JCR is

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In a content management system, the actual data that the system or the users manipulate comes from many kinds of sources. Content can come from a JCR repository, or from a relational database, or from an LDAP directory, or from a semantic storage engine like Jena, or from any other kind of open or proprietary storage engine.

But fundamentally all these kinds of content, which I’ll call “records”, aren’t very different:

• a record can be created, viewed, modified, deleted,
• a record can often be copied or moved,
• a record obeys a schema that can be known to the system, this means that its individual fields are strictly typed,
• when being viewed or modified, a record has a user interface that is based on forms, labels, widgets, depending on the schema,
• records can be searched and a result set returned,
• records can be listed in a compact form (search

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