JCR service deprecation (2.7)

Status Quo

There are two elements at issue here:

  • a JCR adaptor for Sakai's Content Hosting Service (CHS), which was intended to allow CHS to talk to a JCR repo. This is an experiment that has not been production hardened.
  • a JCR Service that allows Sakai to access a JCR repo (ie. without going through CHS). It has been used in production at both Cambridge and NYU, where it has been ported to Xythos and supports a contrib tool. This service is disabled by default, but can be turned on with a configuration property.

Both are not being actively developed or maintained.

Proposal

Remove the JCR adaptor to contrib.

Deprecate the JCR Service in kernel-1.1 (ie. Sakai 2.7) and remove in kernel-1.2 (to contrib). Announce this decision with a deprecation alert and provide one or more reminders of JCR's impending removal during 2010, early 2011.

Who would be affected

No OOTB functionality would be affected, just those institutions who integrate with a JCR repo. At the moment, this seems to be only Cambridge and NYU.