OBSOLETE
Can an off-the-shelf content repository (CR) provide the functionality needed for the back end of Synapse?
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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
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- 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
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http://code.google.com/p/couchdb-python/
(Enterprise) Content Management Systems:
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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
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"enterprise content management"
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Nuxeo
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is a comprehensive free software/open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_content_management
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dotCMS
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dotCMS is a free software / open source web content management system (wCMS)
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Alfresco an open source enterprise content management system
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Magnolia (CMS)
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is an Open-Source content management system (CMS) developed by Magnolia International Ltd., based in Basel, Switzerland
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uses jackrabbit under the hood
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Hippo CMS
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...for multi-channel distribution like web sites and intranets.
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uses jackrabbit under the hood
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Apache Lenya
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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.
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