I decided to play around a little with Jackrabbit the other day… here are some of my notes…

I am running on Ubuntu with Tomcat 6 and all I had to do to get started was download the Jackrabbit war distribution and install it in the webapps directory, then add the jcr-1.0.jar (downloaded from Sun) to the TOMCAT/lib directory. Once you start up the server and go into the context you get a nice welcome screen:

Welcome screen

Welcome screen

I created a content repo in my home directory: 

/home/cjstehno/.jackrabbit

Once the repo is configured you get a list of common clients, with links on how to use them:

Common clients

Common clients

I was interested in Standard WebDAV to do some simple content sharing between a few computers. It seemed simple enough and there is even a WebDAV connection setup in Ubuntu, but I had a heck of a time getting it to work. Finally I just tried pasting the connection URL into Nautilus directly:

http://localhost:8080/jackrabbit/repository/default

but that didn’t work, so I tried a slight change,

dav://localhost:8080/jackrabbit/repository/default

which worked and asked me for a username and password, which the documentation says will take anything until you configure it. It looked like I had everything up and running:

View from Nautilus

View from Nautilus

Looks can be deceiving… I could add files but not edit them or add directories; however, after a refresh of the WebDAV view my folder was there. It did allow me to copy files from it into other directories and then work with them as normal. It does not seem like a very useful means of accessing the files. I can view everything in the web interface, but that is really not much better.

I decided to try connecting using one of the more programmatic means, the RMI client provided with Jackrabbit. It was actually very easy to connect and use. After digging around for a while with the files I had in the repository, It seems that this content repository stuff is quite flexible and could be very powerful, but the learning curve to make good use of it may be a little high… and there seems to be little documentation.

I wrote a little dumper app, which I called Jackalope so I could see how things were laid out in the repo:

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public class Jackalope {
   public static void main( final String[] args ) {
        final ClientRepositoryFactory factory = new ClientRepositoryFactory();
        Session session = null;
        try {
            final Repository repo = factory.getRepository( "//localhost/jackrabbit.repository" );
            session = repo.login( new SimpleCredentials("cjstehno", "foo".toCharArray() ) );

            final String user = session.getUserID();
            final String name = repo.getDescriptor(Repository.REP_NAME_DESC);
            System.out.println("Logged in as " + user + " to a " + name + " repository.");

            final Workspace ws = session.getWorkspace();
            System.out.println("Workspace: " + ws.getName());

            final Node node = session.getRootNode();
            System.out.println("Node: " + node.getName());

            final NodeIterator children = node.getNodes();
            System.out.println("Children: " + children.getSize());
            while(children.hasNext()){
                final Node child = (Node)children.next();
                System.out.println("--> " + child.getName() + " [" + child.getPrimaryNodeType().getName() + "]");

                final NodeDefinition nodeDef = child.getDefinition();
                System.out.println("-->\tn: " + nodeDef.getDeclaringNodeType().getName());

                final PropertyIterator props = child.getProperties();
                while(props.hasNext()){
                    final Property prop = (Property)props.next();
                    System.out.println("-->\tp: " + prop.getName() + " = " + prop.getValue().getString());
                }

                if(! child.getPrimaryNodeType().isNodeType( "rep:system" ) ){
                    final VersionHistory history = child.getVersionHistory();
                    System.out.println("--> labels: " + Arrays.toString( history.getVersionLabels() ));
                }

            }

        } catch (final Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } finally {
            session.logout();
        }
    }
}

It’s nothing fancy, just a little code to poke around. There was apparently an Eclipse plug-in for navigating through JCR repos, but it has since died away. (Also, if you get errors running the code above, remove the last if block related to versioning… the versioning functionality is not well documented and this was bombing a lot for me).

Interesting stuff, but not really what I was looking for. I will keep it in mind for future use.

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