Hello all, I've been watching Slide for close to two years as a user/integrator for document & content management. Here is my two cents as an end-user of the project:
*WebDAV is great for document and content management, and Jakarta Slide is the only project that fully supports this. The JCR may be nice, but it is java-specific and when dealing with document & content management, WebDAV is language agnostic and a better approach. There are also a lot of tools that recognize and use WebDAV and not JCR (including .NET support for WebDAV). *Mailing List usage is dwindling, but I believe it is not because people don't want the project to thrive as much as frustration with the mailing list. There have been some key individuals (like Oliver) who have definitely helped, but they are few. *Part of the problem is that Jakarta Slide codebase is extremely abstracted and complex to follow -- not that abstract hasn't benefited it, but it is difficult for people to get started/understand the codebase. As for usage/configuration, examples of full implementations don't exist, only snippets that don't necessarily correlate with other snippets. Although once someone has digested all the snippets they can move forward, someone new would find this daunting. *Jakarta Slide is dormant - there have been a number of key and very important fixes and enhancements made since the 2004 release of slide 2.1, but these enhancements and fixes continue to be only within the SCM -- no releases have been made with these changes leaving users forced to always build from the SCM to get these fixes and features -- new users not familiar with Slide or the process may have poor impressions based on the 2004 binary versus what is available in the SCM. Also, dormant from the standpoint of a number of bugs left in bugzilla. *Jackrabbit vs Slide - I am looking forward to transistion to Jackrabbit, but **the Slide project must maintain visibility until Jackrabbit can equally support WebDAV**, this includes the DASL <basicsearch> searching component that is a recognized standard. Yes, I recognize the JCR does support Xquery, but tools that work with WebDAV (i.e. web publishing tools both open source and commercial, document management/knowledge management solutions using WebDAV repositories) don't support this, and for document & content management the DASL <basicsearch> and the rest of WebDAV are a requirement. In summary, please keep Jakarta Slide visible until the Jackrabbit project can replace the WebDAV functionality found in Slide. In addition, a transition tool to move Jakarta Slide repositories to Jackrabbit would be a huge benefit to those users out there still using Slide. Thank you, -D
