PUBLIC MARKS with tags jackrabbit & java

It is extremely common for applications to store various pieces of information, most of the time in relational databases. While they do a great job when working with regular data types, they are not very efficient when dealing with binary data, for example images or documents. File systems can be used as an alternative and while they offer better performance, there is neither a query language for searching information nor a notion of relationship or transaction.

The Java Content Repository specification (JSR-170) focuses on "content services," where these not only manage data, but offer author based versioning, full-text searches, fine grained access control, content categorization and content event monitoring. Programmers can use repositories in many ways just like a JDBC connection accesses a database: programmers obtain a connection to a repository, open a session, use the session to access a set of data, and then close the session. The JCR specification has multiple levels of compliance; the most simple level offers read-only access to a repository, XPath-like queries, and some other elements, while other levels of the specification offer a SQL-like query syntax, write capabilities, and more advanced features.

The second version of the JCR API has been released for public review as JSR-283 and, at the same time, the first version (JSR-170) has been doing well: Jackrabbit is now a top-level Apache project