Hi all,
We've started to develope Liferay features as addition to our own customer project development. Currently one of our projects is Liferay CIFS support. We've had lot of requests from customers either to implement better Webdav support or possibility to use CIFS to gain access to Liferay document library.
Previously we've worked on trying to integrate Alfresco and Liferay to share common JCR store but have faced quite a lot of difficulties in doing so.
Better solution was to start from fresh and implement CIFS functionality as Alfresco has. Alfresco uses previously closed source CIFS server implementation called JLAN which was recently released under GPL license.
Alfresco's description of JLAN features:
Alfresco JLAN uses a virtual file system interface that allows you to plug in your own file system implementation with the core server handling all of the network protocol exchange between the client and server. JLAN is also the only Java implementation of Window’s CIFS (Common Internet File System), in addition to supporting NFS and FTP.
Technical Specifications
Pure Java
* Pure Java implementations of CIFS, NFS and FTP server, with optional JNI code on Windows to allow the Alfresco JLAN server to run alongside the Windows file server.
High performance
* Offers the same level of performance as a native file system.
Object oriented pluggable design
* Allows a filesystem driver to be developed in stages with optional interfaces added at a later date, such as NTFS streams support.
* Many core components can be easily replaced including filesystem drivers, authentication handling, user details, shared filesystem mapping, configuration.
Enterprise authentication support
* The CIFS implementation includes support for NTLMv1, NTLMv2, NTLMSSP, SPNEGO and Kerberos/AD to allow integration into Enterprise networks.
Basically what we are currently doing is implementing our own JLAN driver to access Liferay document libarary services. We currently have working 0.1 version which uses SOAP to access Liferay API. In next version we are working directly with Jackrabbit JCR-RMI interface for more performance critical environments.
We will be releasing this functionality with documentation and open source for free use. Currently we are concentrating on CIFS functionality, but basically after JLAN driver development and integration this should also provide NFS and FTP support / connection to Liferay.
I will keep this thread updated of our development progress and releases. If someone at Liferay is intrested of this contribution, please feel free to contact me. Also any suggestions and feedback is highly appreciated!
Best regards,
Janne Hietala
Consultant, partner
Arcusys Oy
+358 (0) 40 831 42 45
janne.hietala(at)arcusys.fi
