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ECM: The Chemistry Behind CMIS
CMIS (Content Mangement Interoperability Services) is a relatively new ECM proposal to specify a common interface for document library services capabilities of a repository. The specification covers core ECM functionality and the goal is for it to become a standard lowest-common-denominator API for accessing content across many different repositories, much like SQL has become the standard language for accessing relational data in databases.
The hope is that a common language like CMIS would encourage the development of a new breed of composite applications that involve content originating from multiple repositories.
An early draft of CMIS came out in 2008, and now an OASIS committee is reviewing that specification and hammering out the remaining details. Many are hopeful the an approved OASIS standard for CMIS will be available before the end of 2009 or in early 2010. The exciting thing is that some vendors, like EMC/Documentum and Alfresco, already have working implementations of early-draft CMIS interfaces for their repositories.
And now Apache has announced an open source project for creating a generic CMIS implementation. The project is called Apache Chemistry and it is an Apache Incubator project. A number of the development contributors to the Chemistry project were frequent contributors to the Apache JackRabbit reference implementation of the JSR-170 standard.
Chemistry will be a Java implementation of CMIS. It will provide the high-level API as specified by CMIS and it will also include a low-level SPI (Service Provider Interface) suitable for developers that want to be able to fast-track a CMIS implementation for a content repository.
Apache Chemistry might be just what CMIS needs to speed adoption by the content management vendor community.
