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Streamline Content Management with CRX
by Drew Falkman
Content. It's everywhere—in your Web site, on your intranet, on every user's computer in your organization. It is being created, and deleted, and modified at a nauseating pace. Even this article is content. Yet despite content's ubiquity, there has been no API level process for handling content in Java. Everyone's been creating their own implementations and methods for storing and accessing content, and when it's come to integration, this created a nightmare. JSR (Java Specification Request) 170 changes all this by finally defining an API for accessing content.
It is certainly no coincidence that content management company Day Software's CTO, David Nuescheler, is the specification lead on this process (the membership of this JSR group reads like a who's who of Java and content management software: IBM, Vignette, BEA, Sun, Macromedia, Oracle, etc.). Day has released, what is to my knowledge, the only content repository that implements this new standard: CRX.
Introduction
The idea of a content repository is that it's a storage mechanism for disparate forms of content, both from the file system and from any relevant databases. A content repository should handle any type of content, from simple numbers to image files to any structured documents, like Word documents or XML files. The core idea is this: we currently use content management systems (CMS), source tools, and a horde of other applications to handle content for a number of different purposes with in an organization. A repository would serve as a center for all this content. CRX intends on being that repository, while providing a standardized interface (via JSR 170) to access this data from any Java application.
Why Not a Database? Or the File System?
Why not just use a database to store this information? Or simply use a file system to maintain it? Day explains the difference on their Web site, but in short: neither system handles everything efficiently. Things like sorting, binary data handling, and versioning may be handled by one or the other...or neither. Hence, the need for CRX.
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