Most online JCR resources provide introductory material but lack further guidance for using the specification in anger. This article walks through performing reads, writes, queries and deletions with a transient repository, but then delves deeper with questions and answers that address common issues most new JCR users are met with. What issues do you find present themselves when using JCR? Have you come across any other problems beyond those discussed in this article?

I choose Jackrabbit in a important project last year and felt frustrated when I encountered following problems: 1/ Lucene index crash when server shutdown abnomally. No convenient to recover. 2/ The distribution deployment implementation (RMI) is temporary in Jackrabbit. 3/ I didn't found a comprehensive DB persistence solution. The patterns in JCR are great. The technology is hopeful but I suggest you may think again when you use it in a commercial project.

Have you tried any other implementations? We, at eXo, have released a new version of our distribution (eXo JCR 1.1). It may solve some of your problems

I agree with Benjamin that before jumping to choosing a JCR implementation a new product should look into existing implementations (and we are listing quite a few in the article). By the time I have started using JCR for real life apps, Jackrabbit was far from being ready, and there were no alternatives. These days things are looking much much better. Unforutnately, I really think there are two missing things from the JCR world: the "best practices" chapter and a way to quantify the quality of each implementation. Joe and myself are trying to address the first, and we are strongly thinking about the second. I was pinged by Artem Melentyev from eXo that pointed me to the existance of some performance tests using JMeter. These indeed would represent a good start. cheers, ./alex -- .w( the_mindstorm )p.

Indeed, we have some JMeter tests that you can conigure yourself thanks to that documentation: http://docs.exoplatform.org/exo-documents/exo-jcr.site/jmeter.html At the bottom of the page you will find 2 links with the test results for a dedicated configuration and running in read mode for 50 threads and in write mode for 5 threads. Of course each configuration is different and you should run those tests for you own configuration.

The Spring Modules project includes support for JCR. Well worth checking out. Simplifies repository access code.

The Spring Modules project includes support for JCR.
Well worth checking out. Simplifies repository access code.

Agreed. Spring Modules' JCR access is quite nice. The code is a little verbose for my tastes, especially in an article like this one, so we chose to leave it out. I have to say, though, in my projects, I'm using Spring Modules to manage things. :)