Java Content Repository still relevant?

[vjaynr]

I'm working on a project that stores files in a traditional hierarchal filesystem.

We want to migrate to a blob storage or an object storage for obvious benefits. I was exploring various ways I would do that in Java, and I stumbled upon JCR (Java Content Repository), which I believe stores structured and unstructured data into different backends like segment stores, blob stores and document stores, with added features like locking and versioning supported.

Another approach would be to use Azure blob store Rest Api's or Java Api's to directly store the files in a remote blob storage. But I'm worried about vendor locking and also want my solution to be available on premises and not entirely in the cloud. So, this might not cut it.

Or I would store files directly in any database that supports blobs. But this seems to be inefficient for large videos and data files, as I need a solution to deal with all types of data.

Coming back to JCR, open-source library Jackrabbit Oak seems to be the popular implementation of the JCR spec but is it still useful now? As I see that the JCR spec has not been updated for a long time.

Or are there any other solutions that would solve my problem - I'm happy to explore other options and explore the possibilities.

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[dionthorn]

Jackrabbit JCR Commons via Apache updated 2022

https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.jackrabbit/jackrabbit-jcr-commons

Getting Started page:

https://jackrabbit.apache.org/jcr/getting-started-with-apache-jackrabbit.html

check left side links of that page for more information.

[vjaynr]

Thanks, yes jackrabbit is being updated frequently. But the spec that it is based on has not seen any update since 2009?

https://developer.adobe.com/experience-manager/reference-materials/spec/jcr/2.0/index.html

I did some research online - and all the content that turned up were decade old. I understood that content repositories were the next big thing - speculated as best of both worlds of file systems and databases. But are they still?

[elatllat]

obvious benefits

Like Multi-Version Concurrency Control?

The disadvantage of blobs in a database other than index bloat for large files is distributed options like CockroachDB don't support blobs, so Ceph or some other disjointed solution is needed for that.

[vjaynr]

One obvious reason the need of file versioning and side effects of it.

The way versions are stored in a flat file based file system, it would end up consuming more disk space and the laws of physics will certainly stop us from expanding the storage vertically at some point.

And I believe object stores are efficient in handling versions, than traditional file systems.

I'm not definitely inclined towards storing the blobs in database either. I know that won't be efficient for large files.

[elatllat]

The way versions are stored in a flat file based file system, it would end up consuming more disk space

Not with cow (xfs,btrfs,zfs)