Advantages of using Jackrabbit Oak over MongoDB

Question

We are building a news website similar to a blogging platform or a CMS. Users can write articles, post comment, like and share. We are newbies and are unable to decide between Jackrabbit Oak and MongoDB?

I went through the following thread When to use JCR (content repository) over other options?. I understood that JCR allows to organize your content in a structure that closely matches your needs. I think this can be accomplished in MongoDB also. The answer compares JCR to RDBMS rather than NoSQL DBs like Mongo.

Also JCR Oak seems a bit complex so I would prefer to keep the stack simple and invest time on MongoDB - Unless Jackrabbit offers features which are extremely important and not present in MongoDB.

Can somebody explain is there any killer feature in JCR Oak over MongoDB?

Owensby

Answer 1

We are finally going ahead with Cassandra.

1. Through my research I found out that JCR doesn't seem to have a large active community and the amount of tutorials is also limited. Mongo is far ahead of JCR and is being used in production at several companies. Could not find any killer feature in JCR over MongoDB.

2. I also read several blog posts that although Mongo is a great DB and easy to start development - after a while if your website is growing fast scalebility might create some challenges and performance might also got hit. See one of the blog post here: http://patrickmcfadin.com/2014/02/11/mongodb-this-is-not-the-database-you-are-looking-for/

3. Although we are not worried about scalebility right now but I found merit in masterless architecture of Cassandra, CQL being almost similar to SQL and there are performance benchmarks posted on PlanetCassandra that shows Cassandra scales linearly.

Owensby

Thanks. I was looking for something like this in 2014, I chose JCR, and I must say that it was a good solution only for the dev, as it made dev simpler and easier, but in time I started to look for sth else. Can you pls elaborate on what do you think of your choice Cassandra now? How about some graph db, like Neo4j? – Photochromy

Actually we started with Cassandra but that project got scrapped in 2 months and I joined another company where we use MongoDB. Haven't used Neo4j so can't comment on that. In my experience I have found that we should not waste too much time trying to find the perfect solution. Just get started with most likely choice. MongoDB is preferable if you are building a product whose requirements are not very clear because you can change schema effortlessly. SQL - if the requirements are clear. Move to Cassandra once you face scalability issues. Neo4j - If you have social networking features. – Owensby

Answer 2

JCR (Java Content Repository) is only a API Specification. Apache Jackrabbit OAK is the complementary implementation of the JCR. Oak supports multiple underlying storages for content, like NoSQL, RDBMS, File System. So the interesting thing about Jackrabbit OAK is that it can work on top of MongoDB. So you can have JCR and MongoDB at the same time.

Saleem