Created in: 2006-02-18 20:04:04
Author: martin
Size: 11134 bytes
Last updated: 2006-02-18 20:04:04
jLibrary is an Open Source Document Management System based on Apache Jackrabbit and compliant with JSR-170 specification. jLibrary is oriented both for personal use as for enterprise use providing embedded and standalone servers. With jLibrary, you can manage all your documents, music, videos or any other media type. jLibrary allows editing these documents with your favorite tools like Acrobat, Word, AutoCAD, Mozilla, etc. With jLibrary you will be able to catalog your information in categories, download and index documents from Internet, create relationships between documents, generate web pages, perform version management, export and share information repositories, and many more.
jLibrary has leveraged Eclipse RCP to offer its users a bunch of usability features. The next lists summarizes some of them:
One of the main gaps on the Document Management System industry is the lack of desktop based tools to handle and manage efficiently information. This gap is even greater if we try to look for Open Source tools. Currently, the market is flooded by web management tools, but there is also a need for desktop based tools.
Desktop based document management is by far more agile than traditional web management. With a desktop based tool like jLibrary you can simply drag and drop documents from your operating system over your repository, reorganize the documents simply ordering them on a tree, drag documents and drop them over categories, link documents with a simple mouse movement, etc. In summary, with few mouse moves you can do complex operations that with a web management tool would take several minutes.
Also, jLibrary solves the problem of document editing leveraging Eclipse ActiveX support. With jLibrary you can edit your documents with your favorite tools. For example, you can use Microsoft Word to work with your Word files and not an unfriendly web editor. And respect to remote viewing files, jLibrary includes a basic document web browser and a WebDAV client that can be easily integrated with your operating system.
Another problem that jLibrary solves is the online-requirement. jLibrary allows to work offline with repositories thanks to its embedded server. With jLibrary an user can for example copy his enterprise documents to his laptop on his own repository, and take the work to home. Then, for example he could work offline on the weekend, and back again on Monday he will update the corporate repository with brand new versions of those documents. With traditional web-based tools, you always have to be connected to work.
jLibrary has done the most difficult part on the DMS space. It's an agile desktop tool to handle document repositories, and it will be fairly easy to create web applications (weblog, CMS, wikis, ...) over this repositories, and so you could leverage the best of both worlds: web and desktop.
Basically, jLibrary is made up of two parts: jLibrary client and jLibrary sever.
jLibrary server is based on Apache Jackrabbit, an Open Source implementation of JSR-170 specification. jLibrary server offers document storage providing several persistence mechanisms like embedded database, external database, local filesystem, XML storage, etc. jLibrary server offers support for document versioning, document locking/unlocking, category management, author management, document linking, basic security, and more.
The jLibrary server can run embedded to the client, providing end users a way to work with their home repositories, or work locally without the need of a network access. You can copy or move documents between repositories without any problem.
jLibrary server also offers a basic web repository browser that allows remote users to access your documents, and even a WebDAV server that allows the use of a WebDAV client to browse through jLibrary documents. Thus, there won't be any problem to create a shared network drive on your Windows operating system to access your corporate jLibrary repository. There is also a simple web interface that allows access to the content through standard HTTP protocol.
Furthermore, jLibrary server is based on web services. It uses also SOAP+Attachments and SOAP compression to transfer binary contents with great performance. This web services support, makes very easy to access jLibrary repositories from other platforms or programming languages.
On the other hand, jLibrary client is an Eclipse RCP desktop application. jLibrary client offers several perspectives to work with your documents. The repository perspective allows users to handle all the information: open an edit their documents using their favorite tools; edit document description, authors, keywords, urls, resources, etc.; handle document relationships and view these relationships in a graphical editor; lookup and extract text from common document types; create and manage authors; edit several documents like HTML or XML with source code highlighting, etc.
The categories perspective allows users to catalog their documents. They can create multiple parent-child categories and move documents between them. They can even drag and drop categories to change their location on the categories tree. Also, users can configure favorites within each category to give documents more importancy over others.
The web perspective allows users to browse the Internet. Users, can directly download web pages into jLibrary repositories. jLibrary will get those web pages and index their documents and resources into user repositories. You can even track your favorite URLs, and jLibrary will also store your navigation history for easy posterior access.
The security perspective allows users to configure their security perspective. With jLibrary you can define repository users, groups, roles and restrictions. You can restrict access to documents and directories to only desired users and groups, so effectively protecting your repository information.
jLibrary can also export repository contents to HTML thanks to Freemarker defined templates. One of the best samples of this feature is the own jLibrary web (http://jlibrary.sourceforge.net) that is itself a jLibrary repository exported to HTML with a template provided by the application.
jLibrary client GUI has been internationalized to several languages. Currently, the downloadable version has support for English, French and Spanish. The CVS version also has support for Italian an German.
jLibrary client also offers several documentation features. It has an embedded help system that includes all the web documentation. This documentation is also installed by default on the jLibrary standalone server. The jLibrary client, also includes internationalized intro pages and several useful cheatsheets.
jLibrary home page offers a lot of documentation. There is a tutorials section with ten tutorials that would help you to start with jLibrary and explain all the most important features. Also, there is a developers section that would help users to build jLibrary by themselves to easily look at jLibrary source code or even extend jLibrary. There are also several articles, news, use cases description, etc.