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Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2007 16:11:27 +0200
From: Kristian Rink <kawazu@zimmer428.net>
To: users@jackrabbit.apache.org
Subject: [OT] JCR and legacy systems?
Message-ID: <20070907161127.7e1e88db@n428.planconnect.net>
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Folks;

not completely sure whether this is the right place for a question like
that, but lacking a better one, please excuse probably being OT here:

I just made my way into the JCR API some time ago and somehow think
that this is right what we would want / need, here. So far, we do have
a proprietary document management system not offering any real API at
all, and we're into "extending" this in a rather brute way (building
Java wrappers around its file system and backend database rather than
actually using the DMS' mechanisms) to compensate for the lack of
(specifically web-related) features of this piece of software. Mid-term
strategy is to possibly move to some completely new platform, but this
so far hasn't yet started mainly because some man-years of
customization code in the old system.

Mixing JCR in there seems to be a pretty good idea to me, at first.
Given that we manage to implement a JCR "view" on our current DMS and
then to make the tools we need use JCR rather than a "home-grown API",
we wouldn't tie these tools too close to our current system. 

But: I don't have no clue how to get started implementing JCR against a
legacy system. So far, we do have rather clear ideas how the data (and,
thus, the repository) structure inside the DMS looks, how this will
have to look like in JCR, and we're also clear about most of the
infrastructure aspects (user authorization). I'd simply start over
implementing the interfaces provided by the JCR API package and hope
for the best... Is this a sane way to do things? Are there pitfalls
I've not yet taken into consideration? Is it a good idea at all? Or
could I do better by, say, slightly modifying parts of jackrabbit to
just, say, build a virtual repository rather than completely
implementing JCR for our environment?

Ideas / inspirations on that, anyone?
Thanks loads in advance and best regards,
Kristian

-- 
Kristian Rink * http://zimmer428.net * http://flickr.com/photos/z428/
jab: kawazu@jabber.ccc.de * icq: 48874445 * fon: ++49 176 2447 2771
"One dreaming alone, it will be only a dream; many dreaming together
is the beginning of a new reality." (Hundertwasser)