The Apache Jakarta subproject Slide does not exist anymore. After several years of bugfixing only, the project has been stopped and recommends to switch over to other libraries like Jackrabbit.
I introduced Slide a while ago to Conzilla for accessing the WebDAV/SVN data store used by the Collaborilla collaboration server. I was not very happy with the spartan info I got out of some exceptions (some messages were just “null”), the documentation was a bit holey as well. At that time I thought of using Jackrabbit, not just as a WebDAV-client, but as a complete replacement for the LDAP/WebDAV/SVN combination. I like the concept of a real content repository, and that’s exactly what Jackrabbit is: an open source reference implementation of JCR 170.
The next release of Collaborilla will contain major changes, I think it will even be an almost complete rewrite. I don’t know yet whether the backend will be a traditional DBMS or a content repository, but I already know which library is not going to be used anymore.
Hannes Ebner on development and research 