Posts Tagged ‘JBoss’

JBoss DNA, Revisited

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

I decided to take another look at JBoss DNA the other day, and it turned out to be quite a surprise.

It seems that the focus has been refined, and the vision clarified.

The first time I looked at it, DNA was not a repository. Rather it was something that could federate multiple content stores (e.g. – repository/database/file system). I just wasn’t sure what that something was. I believe that is what led me to question how practical it was.

Now, DNA is a repository. However, with this particular repository you can access multiple content stores via the JCR API.

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Posted in Enterprise Content Management, JBoss, Java Content Repository | 1 Comment »

JBoss DNA, Hello.

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

I’m surprised I didn’t come across this earlier. JBoss has a released a new federated repository system: DNA.

http://www.jboss.org/dna

I’ve caught up with the getting started document and the reference guide, and I quite like what I see. First things first, DNA is itself not a JCR implementation (yet). Rather, it unifies one or more repositories and provides a single point of access via the JCR API. The repositories themselves may be JCR compliant, but do not have to be. DNA comes with a variety of connectors such as the JCR, JDBC, and SVN connectors.

I find this to be quite practical. I worked with a number of clients who had multiple repositories whether they be JCR or simple databases. I’ve seen an environment with FileNet, Day Communique, Alfresco, and a number or Oracle databases. I’ve seen another with Magnolia, Day CQ, and a number of Oracle databases. I could cetainly make use of a unified repository in these environments.

I like that DNA is not simply an application, but an extensible framework for developers. It takes advantage of a very modular/pluggable architecture that allows you to write your own connectors (to connect to various repositories), sequencers (to extract metadata from repository content), and more.

Lastly, I thought there were two particular JIRA tasks that I found interesting.

https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/DNA-55 (RESTful API)
https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/DNA-46 (JCR Implementation)

Those two should have a significant impact on just how practical DNA is.

So until next time, good fight, good night.

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Posted in Enterprise Content Management, Java Content Repository | 1 Comment »