Toolkit - A Tridion File System Broker

In the following series of posts, I am describing a custom file system storage, called the Toolkit, that mimics the behaviour of the Tridion File System Broker. There are a couple of noticeable differences from the File System Broker in that it:

• stores items as JSON files on the file system;
• provides dynamic queries functionality;

The Toolkit offers the following functionality:

Backing the Toolkit implementation are the following:

• Model Factory offering CRUD operations on models backed by a cache for model objects and a file system provider acting as data layer abstraction;
• File System Provider acting as Data Abstraction Layer that offers CRUD operations between model objects, JSON de-/serializer, JSON files, and the underlying file system;
• CacheFactory offering EHCache memory storage for frequently used models;
• Cache invalidation mechanism that removes stale items from cache;
• Custom indexes and handling logic that provides performance for content queries;
• Tridion Deployer module and Tridion Storage extension that publish/unpublish the JSON files from the file system;

Each of the modules above are described in following posts.

The Toolkit is written in plain Java without using any additional framework or third party data access / indexing API. The Toolkit does use FasterXML's Jackson JSON API in its interaction with JSON.

Toolkit is available as open source on the GitHub project of this blog (https://github.com/mitza13/yet-another-tridion-blog/tree/master/File System Toolkit). The distributable JARs are available in its /distributable folder.

Some performance metrics of the Toolkit can be found in post Toolkit - Performance.

Installation and configuration steps can be found in post Toolkit - Installation and Configuration.

Examples for using the Toolkit API can be found in post Toolkit - Examples.