Re: Wondering about JCR

I'm wondering if JCR, aka the Content Repository API for Java, could be
useful to me. I've been reading about it - including reading the spec -
but i'm still not really sure. Does anyone have any hands-on experience
with it?

The thing is, my use is not managing anything really document-like, but
nonetheless, it looks like the fundamentals of JCR are still a good fit.
I want to manage a catalogue for an e-commerce site - there's a
hierarchicaly structure comprising a root category at the top, with
subcategories below it, then at some level products, which in turn
contain SKUs. Each of these has a number of properties, things like
name, description, price, and so on. Possibly also images, although
those could be handled externally to the repository.

Now, on the site itself, this stuff is all read-only, with some simple
access patterns based on individual item lookups plus a few kinds of
query, followed by reading properties from the objects found. Here,
something like JPA or another ORM or OODB approach (or even just POJOs
stored with serialisation) is probably right - there's no need for the
complexity of JPA.