Jack Rabbit WebDAV and MS Office

Use Case

Have MS Office to work with Jack Rabbit WebDAV

Solution

The solution given below is for internal usage only. Do not follow if you're not realize what you're exactly doing.

There is well known feature of MS Office which prevents it from correct work with WebDAV. During transmissions back and forth MS Office magically lose important auth headers which actually imply on WebDAV security. After hours of struggling with this, the only solution for internal usage was to disable authorization in Jack Rabbit.

I tried to play with security settings in jack rabbit but wasn't successful. The reason is that by default anonymous user has read only permission and any other login has full permission. I was able to tweak file:
SimpleAccessManager.java, rebuild sources and everything got worked :)

jack rabbit over http / rest

Use Case

Provide REST access to jack rabbit.

Solution

Use following article from jack rabbit guru:

http://jukkaz.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/jackrabbit-over-http/
http://jukkaz.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/content-repository-over-http/

It's also good idea to take a look at: http://sling.apache.org. It works perfectly, but I didn't like it because wan't able to reconfigure it to use external jack rabbit installation.. Maybe another day.

For those who need to access Jack Rabbit from .NET, I may suggest excellent WebDav Client Library for .NET from http://www.webdavsystem.com/client

jboss + jack rabbit

Use Case

Setup Jack Rabbit on JBoss

Solution

JBoss AS (jboss-5.1.0.GA), Jack Rabbit (2.2.0, jackrabbit-webapp-2.2.0.war).

There is official manual on how to setup Jack Rabbit onto JBoss: http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/JackrabbitOnJBoss

However, I prefer to work with WAR distributable files, so, my steps were a bit different:

1. Download jackrabbit-jcr-rmi-2.2.0.jar  from https://repository.apache.org/content/groups/public/org/apache/jackrabbit/jackrabbit-jcr-rmi/2.2.0/jackrabbit-jcr-rmi-2.2.0.jar, put this file to jboss/server/default/lib

2. Copy jackrabbit-webapp-2.2.0.war to deploy directory

3. Start JBoss

In my case, jack rabbit started but wasn't able to create repository. The reason is odd error that default RMI port 1099 was occupied. That error will be fixed in 2.2.1.

I managed to fix this issue by specifying different RMI port (1100) in  jboss\bin\jackrabbit\bootstrap.properties. Not sure that this is correct, but after this, JBoss picked up JackRabbit, created repo, give me webdav access and much more.

Useful links:

JackRabbit Configuration
http://jackrabbit.apache.org/jackrabbit-configuration.html#JackrabbitConfiguration-Securityconfiguration

http://gateway.volantis.com/docs/archives/sf/sf_2_11_5/sf_admin/sf_config_jsr_template.html

Next steps would be to configure WebDAV with MS Office, setup access, configure db file system and play with hadoop.

More info coming.