Jackrabbit on JBoss with JNDI & RMI

We recently decided to use JCR, specifically, it's Apache implementation, JackRabbit. What's already done, is a web application running on Tomcat servlet container. One of the most obvious ways to tie those two, is to deploy JackRabbit on JBoss and expose it via JNDI.

Configuring JBoss Server

First, you need to download JBoss Application Server. Its installation in Ubuntu is as easy as extracting the downloaded jar/zip to the directory where you want JBoss to sit, and setting the JBOSS_HOME variable to that directory in ~/.bashrc.

To deploy JackRabbit, you need to obtain jackrabbit-jca.rar and jackrabbit-rmi.jar from JackRabbit downloads page and jcr-1.0.jar.

Note: The .rar archive contains all JackRabbit dependencies, including concurrent.jar.

You will also need to download the jcr-ds.xml. Edit the file so the <rar-name>jackrabbit-jca.rar</rar-name> property would contain the actual name of the rar you've downloaded (I had jackrabbit-jca-1.4.rar) and the homeDir property would point to the directory where you want JackRabbit to store its stuff.

To complete deployment, you now need to put jackrabbit-jca.rar, jackrabbit-rmi.jar and jcr-ds.xml files to $JBOSS_HOME/server/default/deploy and jcr-1.0.jar to $JBOSS_HOME/server/default/lib.

Note: Apparently, you should be careful about renaming the jcr-ds.xml file. I tried to name it “jcr-ds-1.4.xml” and kept getting JackRabbit deployed incompletely. Once I renamed it back to “jcr-ds.xml”, everything went smoothly.

To start JBoss, do $JBOSS_HOME/bin/run.sh.

Configuring Client

Now you might wanna check your JCR repository. You will need to create a simple function I found in the mail archive:

private static Session getJackrabbitSession() throws RepositoryException {
    Properties env = new Properties();
    env.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY, "org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContextFactory");
    env.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, "jnp://localhost:1099");
    env.put(Context.URL_PKG_PREFIXES, "org.jboss.naming:org.jnp.interfaces");
    
    try {
        InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext(env);
        ClientAdapterFactory adapter = new ClientAdapterFactory();
        RemoteRepository rr;
        rr = (RemoteRepository) ctx.lookup("jnp://localhost:1099/jcrServer");
        Repository repository = adapter.getRepository(rr);
        Credentials credJBoss = new SimpleCredentials("username", "password".toCharArray());
        return repository.login(credJBoss);
    } catch (NamingException ex) {
        ex.printStackTrace();
    }
    
    return null;
}

For that code to work, you will need jcr-1.0.jar, jackrabbit-jcr-rmi.jar, jnp-client.jar and jboss-common.jar libraries in your classpath. The latter two can be found in $JBOSS_HOME/client and $JBOSS_HOME/lib respectively.

If you've done everything correct, and are lucky enough, the “first hops” from Jackrabbit introduction should work fine, with appropriate changes to obtaining Session object done.

Change J2EE version of NetBeans Project

A java project I've been working was initially started as J2EE1.4 one, but finally had to be moved to J2EE5. Apparently, there's no GUI way to do this in NetBeans (nor 6 neither 5.5).

When you select Project->Properties->Run, J2EE version is just displayed in a text field which value I couldn't change. Maybe this is a bug of NetBeans, maybe this is an intentional limitation.

Anyway, after some painful hours spent in moving classes and configs into a newly created J2EE5 project and fighting errors popped, I just took an advice of a fellow developer, checked how things are done in project.properties file and put j2ee.version=1.5 instead of 1.4.