Adobe buys Day Software

Earlier this morning Adobe announced their intention to acquire Switzerland-based Day Software, makers of the Web Content Management (WCM) products. Day Software contributes a lot to open source, including major contributions to the Jackrabbit, Sling, Chemistry, and other Apache open source projects that serve as a foundation for their products.

Adobe, on the other hand, is known for their proprietary products, including CS5, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and the Flash platform and development tools, but not really well-known as an open-source company. The FAQ on the acquisition doesn’t really mention open source (or Apache), so it was interesting to read Jukka Zitting’s take. Jukka is a committer on multiple Apache projects and is an Apache mentor and PMC chair for Jackrabbit.

People outside of Adobe and Day are also raising questions about what this means, especially when the news comes with no mention of Day’s open source contributions.  Boris Kraft, CTO at Magnolia International (another CMS/WCM vendor), gave his impressions of the deal. Magnolia a nice product (which we use at JBoss.org) that runs on top of a JCR repository. As Boris mentions, Magnolia currently uses Jackrabbit but is really independent of any single JCR – and can in fact run on ModeShape.

Do your projects or products use Jackrabbit, and if so does this news give you concern? There’s no better time to look at ModeShape, the open source JCR 2.0 repository that bundles in federation, sequencing, and whole host of other slick features.

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Filed under: jcr, news, open source, repository

ModeShape 2.0 is here

The ModeShape project proudly announces that version 2.0 is now available and ready for use. As usual, the artifacts are in the JBoss Maven repository (under the “org.modeshape” group ID) and on our downloads page, and we’ve updated our Getting Started Guide, Reference Guide , and JavaDoc. ModeShape 2.0 also includes bug fixes and improvements; see the release notes complete list of bug fixes, new features, tasks, and other changes.

This is a significant milestone for us, because ModeShape 2.0 now implements the JCR 2.0 specification (JSR-283). Specifically, ModeShape supports all the JCR 2.0 required features:

• repository acquisition
• authentication
• reading/navigating
• query
• export
• node type discovery
• permissions and capability checking

and most of the JCR 2.0 optional features:

• writing
• import
• observation
• workspace management
• versioning
• locking
• node type management
• same-name siblings
• orderable child nodes
• mix:etag, mix:created and mix:lastModified mixins with autocreated properties

ModeShape 2.0 supports five query languages: the JCR-SQL2 and JCR-QOM query languages defined in JSR-283, the XPath and JCR-SQL languages defined in JSR-170 but deprecated in JSR-283, and a search-engine-like language that is actually just the full-text search expression grammar used in the CONTAINS(…) function of the JCR-SQL2 language. See our documentation for details.

As with earlier releases, ModeShape repositories can be traditional self-contained stores, or they can federate and unify content from multiple stores, including files systems, databases, data grids, other JCR repositories, or other systems (using custom connectors). Plus, ModeShape is also able to automatically extract and store useful content from files you upload into the repository using its library of sequencers, making that information much more accessible and searchable than if it remains locked up inside the stored files. Finally ModeShape provides WebDAV and RESTful services so non-Java and remote clients can access the repository content.

The ModeShape 2.0 release has not yet passed the JSR-283 TCK. ModeShape passes nearly all (99%) of the TCK tests, but we’ve identified several issues in the TCK tests (see JCR-2648, JCR-2661, JCR-2662, and JCR-2663). Once an updated TCK becomes available, we’ll get our certification.

If you’re already using JCR 1.0, consider switching to JCR 2.0 and ModeShape. The new features and enhancements are much improved over JCR 1.0. And we’ve created a high-level migration guide to help you understand you may and may not have to change in your application.

Many, many thanks to the ModeShape community members. Our users and contributors are simply stellar! Congratulations!

Filed under: features, federation, jcr, news, repository