What is the Roadmap for resolving problems with JCR?

[bernardus_reute]

Hello Alfresco,

For our commercial projects we are looking for an open source CMS with a JCR-Interface. We installed and evaluated Alfresco and are now having the following questions.

What is the roadmap of Alfresco with regards to JCR? Is it still true that a stable JCR-RMI connector is currently not available (referring to http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?t=5942). Do you plan a stable JCR based remote (RMI, WebDAV) adaptor in the near future? If yes, when will it be available?

We checked the JCR-JNDI adaptor. It works, but we ran into the problem "Only one active session is allowed per thread."

Can you advice on how to resolve this problem?

Regards Bernardus Reuter-Bol

[paulhh]

Hi

We are participating in the new version of the JCR, so are monitoring what the future might be there.  We have seen only limited uptake of the use of JCR in our commercial customers, since they often find their needs go wider than the core standard provides, or because the paradigm doesn't fit well with their needs.  We are keen supporters of open standards for content management.  If there are issues with our JCR implementation we will try our best to resolve them.

Cheers
Paul.

[rdanner]

Hello Alfresco,

For our commercial projects we are looking for an open source CMS with a JCR-Interface. We installed and evaluated Alfresco and are now having the following questions.

What is the roadmap of Alfresco with regards to JCR? Is it still true that a stable JCR-RMI connector is currently not available (referring to http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?t=5942). Do you plan a stable JCR based remote (RMI, WebDAV) adaptor in the near future? If yes, when will it be available?

We checked the JCR-JNDI adaptor. It works, but we ran into the problem "Only one active session is allowed per thread."

Can you advice on how to resolve this problem?

Lastly …

Regards Bernardus Reuter-Bol[/quote
]

Hi Bernadus,

I think the best possible solution is to use JCR the way alfresco wants which is one active session.  That may not be possible if you already have an app with a certain  behavioral profile. 

Another option is to use the JCR-RMI solution with the dedicated thread solution – but here is what you need to know about that – its a pool of threads of configurable size – which means you can open as many sessions as you want – but the relate directly to a thread on the remote end which… can get pretty ugly if you have to scale up real big and you have long running sessions.

Personally… I've left JCR for the time being.  It's early days for CM standards and I'm glad to see they are underway but it doesn't seem like there is real consolidation of mind and effort in the space yet (IMO.) 

Alfresco has a good many ways to connect to it remotely… and if your app only talks JCR – maybe you can write a simple adapter on top of webscripts or web services.  I think the really important thing about Alfresco – and the thing that should keep your attention on it – is that you can define your own interface to it and you can plug in an execution environment for that API.  It comes out of the box with a javascript-freemarker execution environment but you can plug in a raw java environment if you need the horses.

The last time I talked with Lenard… and it has been a while.. (Hope all is well Lenard!) he had successfully deployed the thread-bound JCR-RMI solution and had load tested it to prove it would meet his needs.  You may want to ping him and see how it's going.