uri: http://dev.day.com/microsling/content/blogs/main/jcr-consolidation.html
posted 11 January 2008 by David Nuescheler
filed under jcr jsr-170 jsr-283
When I speak at conferences and other occasions about JCR the question
of adoption is asked frequently.
People usually think of adoption as
"getting as many repository vendors as possible
to adhere to the specification". This is probably
because a lot of people see JCR primarily as a vehicle
to integrate content from various
repository vendors.
It is important to mention that JCR has been
very successful in that respect.
To illustrate
that please check my slide below for
repository vendors that I am aware of that
can be accessed through JCR, hence are JCR
compliant to a specific level
(please feel free to let me know of
repositories that I am not aware of).
Now this means for example that you can hook-up Microsoft Sharepoint to a standardized java interface and virtualize the content with any of the other JCR compliant repositories.
While this integration aspect certainly is a big part of the mission of JCR, it is clearly not the only goal and most certainly not the only way how JCR impacts the market towards standardization.
Application developers do no longer have to
implement their own repositories, but can use
off the shelf standards compliant repositories
like for example Apache Jackrabbit.
Every application developer that does not build their
own repository is "one repository down".
This changes the game drastically and makes the application developers a lot more nimble, not having to implement features like access control, versioning, hierarchies, or multi-value properties that really every application that I can think of requires.
It is very encouraging to see the quick rate at which new
JCR applications are being developed.
Ultimately the applications that exist on top of JCR
will drive the adoption and will fuel the consolidation
of the JCR infrastructure market.
The important question is not "How many repositories
are compliant" but "How many applications are using jcr
as its backing store".
I always like to use relational databases as a parallel when
it comes to the evolution of an infrastructure market.
It was SQL as the initial relational standard that allowed
application developers to build applications without having
to ship their embedded proprietary database with the application
and that finally led to the consolidation that we have today
in the database market.
It is important to understand that this cycle from chaos, through standardization, to infrastructure and finally to commodity usually takes around 10-25 years and we are at the very early beginning with respect to JCR.
