OBSOLETE
Can an off-the-shelf content repository (CR) provide the functionality needed for the back end of Synapse?
...
YES - versioning of objects
YES MAYBE (Bruce thought he saw it was, but Dave found a comment to the contrary) - fine grained authorization/security (would need to know how users and groups are represented)
Additional comments from Dave:
The JBOSS DNA project didn't actually implement authorization, just authentication (with JAAS):
http://docs.jboss.org/jbossdna/0.2/manuals/reference/html/environment.html#authorization
Jackrabbit's JCR 2.0 impl ... looks like they DID implement a nice looking Node-level hierarchical authorization scheme. Their wiki discusses the features and pros/cons for the different styles of authZ:
http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/AccessControl?highlight=%28authorization%29
but the API clearly has Resource (Node) based authorization actually implemented in it:
http://jackrabbit.apache.org/api/2.2/org/apache/jackrabbit/api/security/JackrabbitAccessControlList.html
Given that and their nice SVN/CVS like versioning, the 2.0 spec impl looks a lot more attractive that the 1.x impl.
YES, by leveraging content nodes to represent this metadata - meta data for users and groups
...
- are the attributes sufficiently flexible?
- what's a "relative path", a "reference", a "PATH" property type?
- what's an "unstructured node"?
- how does JAAS link to Crowd?
- does JCR support user groups?
Notes:
- There is a Spring template for JCR
...
(Enterprise) Content Management Systems:
ECMs seem to be more complete systems (with a web UI) for managing documents on-line. (Think of Google blogspot.) So this line of exploration may be a dead-end.
OpenCMS an open source content management system written in Java http://demo.opencms.org/en/ "enterprise content management"
Nuxeo is a comprehensive free software/open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_content_management
dotCMS dotCMS is a free software / open source web content management system (wCMS)
Alfresco an open source enterprise content management system
Magnolia (CMS) is an Open-Source content management system (CMS) developed by Magnolia International Ltd., based in Basel, Switzerland uses jackrabbit under the hood
Hippo CMS ...for multi-channel distribution like web sites and intranets. uses jackrabbit under the hood
Apache Lenya Apache Lenya is a Java/XML open-source content management system based on the Apache Cocoon content management framework. Features include revision control, scheduling, search capabilities, workflow support, and browser-based WYSIWYG editors.