ModeShape provides a unified JCR view of the information you already have in your environment: files systems, databases, other repositories, services, applications, etc. Used as a replacement for JackRabbit it allows existing systems to continue "owning" their information while ensuring Magnolia can use the standard JCR API to search, navigate, version, and listen for changes in the content. This talk will present the use case, benefits and experiences made by replacing JackRabbit with ModeShape and provides an outlook of things to come.

2. Extending Magnolia CMS with
ModeShape
Mark Newton
JBoss Community Lead
16th Sept 2010

3. Agenda
• Introduction to the JBoss Community
• How we use Magnolia
• How ModeShape can help
• New possibilities
•Q&A

4. What is the JBoss Community?
• A group of users and developers that contribute to Java
Middleware projects led by Red Hat.
• Projects are integrated together to form platforms or used to
help with development.
• Projects are supported by the community
• Platforms are supported by Red Hat

5. Project Sites
jboss.org
mobicents.org
seamframework.org
jgroups.org

6. How do we compare?
• springsource.org - (13) Help Products
• jboss.org - (100)
• apache.org - (129) Help Foundation
• eclipse.org - (148)
• codehaus.org - (305)
• code.google.com - (~6000) Help Ecosystem
• java.net / kenai.com - (3626 / 12705)
• sourceforge.net - (240,000)

7. jboss.org Infrastructure
• Development tools (JIRA, FishEye, Subversion)
• Integrated wikis, forums, blogs (SBS)
• Mailing lists (Mailman)
• CMS (Magnolia)
• Maven Repository Manager (Nexus)
• Contributor License Agreements (Kryten)
• Blog Aggregation (Borg)
• Proxy Server (Apache)

8. How we use Magnolia
• Each project has a user account at http://jboss.org/author
• Each project team is responsible for their own project pages.
• We have a library of paragraph types and styles for them to
use.
• We use the DMS module to store images for the community
and individual projects. Some projects also store XSD and
DTDs.

9. Accessing Content
• Some content lives outside of Magnolia that we want to use inside.
• Some content lives inside of Magnolia that we want to use outside.

10. JackRabbit Constraints
• JackRabbit is designed to persist content to an internal
datastore.
Persistence Manager
Memory XML Object Database Grid
• Limited access to content in datastore as format is usually
optimized for performance (binary).

11. How ModeShape can help
• ModeShape is a JCR implementation that allows you to
access content that already exists in your environment.
• It can also unify the content from multiple external locations
to provide a single, federated repository.

12. Current Status
Task Status
Integrate Magnolia and ModeShape so we can
replace JackRabbit. Done
Develop a new download paragraph that can browse
binaries on the filesystem using the JCR Browser in In progress
Magnolia.
Reconfigure the DMS to store content onto the
filesystem where it can be accessed by Apache. In progress

13. Benefits to projects
• Magnolia resolved some issues related to using a different
JCR implementation.
More Flexibility!
• ModeShape implemented an optional JCR 1.0 feature (JCR-
SQL).
More Functionality!

14. New Possibilities
• ModeShape connectors can be used to access content from
all the applications at jboss.org and place it into a single
federated repository.
• Paragraphs can access all the content in the federated
repository consistently using the JCR API.
• Sequencers can be used to store structured information
about users with commit rights to Subversion repositories.
• Connectors can be used to detect external changes in
content and trigger notifications.

15. Future Ideas
• Add content from the operations team such as monitoring
statistics from Nagios so we can display them on the site.
• Use the federated repository to perform an audit of user
permissions to check they’re consistent across applications.

16. Q &A