JSR-170 explained
I stumbled upon Apache Jackrabbit tonight. I had heard about JSR-170, and could see some benefits, but this article got me thinking.
As I see it a fairly large corporation has a lot of content. By content I mean a lot of unstructured data as text. This might be stuff like:
- Regulations
- Information
- Procedures
- User handbooks
- Tutorials
- Screen instructions
And the list could go on. Some of this fit nicely together and would probably require the same view and editing systems, while others would require something entirely different. Important gains you get from this is:
- All content in one place eases data maintenance like cleaning and integrity checks
- All systems get the common and often required features for this type of information
- Content can be viewed/edited by several front-end applications without duplication and difficult integration
- Highly specialised views/editors for the given context are much easier to build
Separating concerns into a repository and “the rest” really makes sense for an large enterprise. When this standard gets wider adoption one can choose the best frontend for different target audiences but still have information centralised and easily accessible.