Hi,
Last week the first Oakathon (Hackathon for Oak [1]) took place in
Basel. Overall it was a big success. We where able to sort out much of
the basics of Oak and shape the project for the future. The short term
focus was on the features of the upcoming 0.2 release [2] and I think we
can say we are mostly done with these. The release will most probably
happen in the next couple of days. Apart from what was already there in
the previous release, the 0.2 release will most likely introduce HTTP
bindings, OSGI packaging, garbage collection, much better test coverage
and a lot of progress with the overall JCR functionality.
On a more long term scale we nailed down the module structure for Oak,
clarified much of the APIs and got the basics for name, path and value
handling into place. As a direct consequence there are a lot of code
reorganisations and refactorings and there will likely be more in the
near future.
Oak currently consists of three main modules: oak-mk, oak-core and
oak-jcr. The oak-mk module largely resembles the Microkernel [3]. A
notable new feature here is support for branching off a private working
copy and merging it back to the trunk later [4]. This allows oak-core
and oak-jcr to implement arbitrary large transient spaces by persisting
them as necessary.
On the testing side we where able to get the TCK wired to Oak such that
we can continually monitor our progress and watch for regressions. A
significant number of TCK tests pass already.
While not all gory details are sorted out yet and there are still many
loose ends, the Oakathon left us with a sound basis for going further.
Based on the work done we can follow up with implementing the individual
JCR features in oak-jcr and oak-core.
Michael
[1] http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/Jackrabbit%203
[2] http://markmail.org/message/7dhxklytr2xaoe24
[3] http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/RepositoryMicroKernel
[4] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OAK-45
