Working on a content repository for a client at the moment - have been evaluating JackRabbit and Alfresco as a backend repository for an existing site. Anyway - I was already familiar with Alfresco, but spent a bit of time with JackRabbit today to give a comparison. It's a nice simple implementation of the JCR (JSR-170), but suffers a little from lack of doco when it comes to using it in something other than it's standard configuration.
I needed to test it with Mysql on Tomcat 6 - didn't really have any doco on this - so I added a new page to the wiki. Hopefully this is of use to someone:
http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/JackRabbitOnTomcat6
If you are not into Java and are looking for a way to access JackRabbit, there is WebDAV and also Apache Sling - which provides a RESTful api to JackRabbit. It's in the incubator still - but looks quite nice and has some potential.
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Apache Sling
Hi Spidie, I read your posts on Twitter and thought this might be a good place for a more comprehensive response. Apache Sling is a web framework for content centric applications using a content repository - this means it works with Apache Jackrabbit, but also with other JSR-170 compliant repositories such as Day CRX. Sling offers fully-life-cycle-managed development using Java and OSGi on the one hand, but also supports rapid application development using scripting languages such as server-side Javascript, Python, Ruby, Groovy, etc. Sling comes with a default servlets that give you a RESTful way of accessing the content repository allowing you to access the content repository using HTTP and JSON, but you have all the freedom to override these generic behaviors to add more specific support for your use cases.
Apache Sling is being used in our Day CQ5 Web Content Management System in production (see dev.day.com for lauch coverage) and the fact that Sling is still in the incubator means that the majority of Sling's committers are employees of Day Software, which has a commercial interest in continued development and stability of Sling, but the Apache Software foundation requires a diverse community of developers for graduation of a project. This means being in the incubator tells you a lot about process and community, not only about code and stability.
Apart from that, if you have questions, feel free to contact me (I am trieloff on Twitter), send mails to the Apache Jackrabbit Mailinglist or contact Day Software (we are offering a commercial drop-in-replacement for Jackrabbit, called Day CRX)
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