Posted by Michael Marth JUN 08, 2009
Posted in fudbusting, jcr and jsr-170 Comment 1
Reading "Content Integration Standards -- CMIS, JSR-170, JSR-283" I stumbled over the quote
The conclusion was that JSR-170 is not the best fit for WCM with its nodes and properties equaling to folders and files. In Devnani’s opinion, it fits document management better.
Apparently, there is some confusion around what nodes and properties are in a Java Content Repository. Let's shed some light on this:
First of all, there are two specific node types defined in JSR-170: files and folders. These are node types that behave as you would expect it from a file system. For example, the node type "file" has specific properties for the creation date and the binary stream.
If your content is nothing but files and folders (for example because your application is document management) you would use these node types. As such, in Java Content Repositories files, folders and document management-type applications are special cases of a more generic case.
This more generic case are node types that have different properties than the ones described above. In the most flexible case "unstructured node type" the node can accomodate for any string, date, binary, boolean, etc property. One node could for example have two binary stream properties (thumbnail and full-length). This covers exactly the use case web content management where content is stored on a fine-granular model. The fine-granular model enables the presentation layer to do things like displaying an article in teaser format.
In summary the situation is like this:
- Files and folders are special node types in JCR.
- On a modelling level DM is a special case of WCM (I recognize that on a application requirements level DM and WCM diverge).
As a consequence I would rewrite the quote from above as:
JSR-170 is a very good fit for WCM because the nodes and properties store content in a fine-granular way. Since folders and files are just special node types it can be equally well used for document management.
The Jackrabbit Wiki has a list of JCR applications that are either in the content management or the document management domain. As a side-note: JCR is flexible enough to provide infrastructure for completely different application domains as well, here is a list of some of them.