{"id":13,"date":"2006-03-10T12:21:46","date_gmt":"2006-03-10T20:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=13"},"modified":"2006-03-10T12:21:46","modified_gmt":"2006-03-10T20:21:46","slug":"universal-access-to-data-repositories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/universal-access-to-data-repositories\/","title":{"rendered":"Universal Access to Data Repositories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Universal access to any structured repository is a compelling concept and something that truly warrants the description of being a ‘disruptive technology’<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s still a dream, but\u00a0it has become\u00a0the goal\u00a0behind many\u00a0new technologies\u00a0now operating under the name of Enterprise Information Integration<\/a> (EII).\u00a0 A commonality behind all or most of the EII approaches is an attempt to create a single unified interface that can provide virtual access to many different data stores and repositories that may have implementations spanning vastly different data structures.<\/p>\n

The same trend towards creating a virtual interface spanning heterogeneous systems\u00a0has also been\u00a0happening in the\u00a0world of enterprise content management<\/a> (ECM).\u00a0 The last twenty years have seen many many companies take their stab at the content management space, all creating products with different subsets of the ECM-space feature list and all of them with competing architectural and data models.\u00a0 This is to be expected.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Formtek<\/a> is one of these many vendors — we’ve concentrated on our customers\u00a0and created\u00a0\u00a0quality solutions for the niche industries of their\u00a0businesses.\u00a0 Like many vendors, we feel that the unique solutions we’ve created address very specialized customer requirements.<\/p>\n

But concepts within ECM have been evolving over time and a lot of concepts have matured.\u00a0 Some areas still\u00a0continue to evolve today, especially in the areas of search and compliance.\u00a0 But because of\u00a0the ever\u00a0on-going evolution, there never was an industry-wide shared vision for ECM with a detailed blueprint for how to achieve that vision.\u00a0 This approach has been a healthy one, one that lets products and ideas compete, leading to solutions that address real-world problems.<\/p>\n

The result of this proliferation of systems\u00a0is that large enterprises are finding that their data is being managed by multiple systems.\u00a0 Creating and providing access to enterprise-wide Business Intelligence is hampered by the disparate systems.\u00a0 Collaborative and Convergence technologies are attempting more and more to create consolidated views of all\u00a0information across the enterprise.<\/p>\n

In the world of Java, one\u00a0standard has come about for specifying a common method for accessing content repositories\u00a0across multiple systems.\u00a0 It is JSR-170<\/a> and is also known as the Content Repository API for Java or JCR<\/a>.\u00a0 Day Software<\/a> has been the main proponent behind hammering out this standard.\u00a0\u00a0Day’s visionaries Roy Fielding<\/a> and David Nuescheler<\/a><\/span> (spec lead) have been authors\u00a0and promoters of the new approach towards standardizing the access across repositories. \u00a0They have made great\u00a0attempts of trying to be inclusive by bring more than 60 vendors into the standardization process, including vendors like IBM, Oracle, Stellant and Filenet.\u00a0 Day clearly outlines the benefits<\/a> of a standard approach towards accessing content, and with broad support, this could be very disruptive.<\/p>\n

Day has also been leading a reference implementation of JSR-170 called the JackRabbit<\/a> project.\u00a0 It is being hosted as an Apache incubator project<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The JackRabbit project, perhaps for portability reasons,\u00a0is a non-DB based implementation of the JSR-170 spec.\u00a0 It serves the purpose well as a reference implementation, but some question whether\u00a0this implementation\u00a0can be ‘industrial strength’ enough for enterprise applications — DB vendors have spent years wrestling with problems related to high-volume transactions and scalability.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Other factors that have impeded acceptance of JSR-170 to date have been\u00a0no major commercial vendors\u00a0offering JSR-170 connectors for their repositories, the fact that the specification was frameworked within Java, the level of difficulty in creating\u00a0a JSR-170\u00a0interface for an existing product, and the\u00a0implications of being a lowest-common-denominator technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Undoubtedly many ECM vendors view JSR-170 as a threat to their installed base and have been reluctant to move forward with the technology.\u00a0 Day has helped to accelerate the process by creating connectors for two major vendors, Documentum\/EMC<\/a> and Filenet<\/a>.\u00a0 Day has also pledged<\/a> to create JSR-170\u00a0connectors for OpenText LiveLink, Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Domino.doc, Software AG Tamino, and Interwoven.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The availability of connectors to existing ECM systems will be a major decision point for determining whether or not the technology can be useful for\u00a0customers or not.\u00a0\u00a0Maybe a\u00a0decision by Day (and others)\u00a0to Open Source a collection of JSR-170 connectors for popular ECM vendor systems would truely accelerate the disruptive power of this technology — but this does not yet seem to be their current business strategy.<\/p>\n

Then there is the\u00a0choice of Java<\/a>.\u00a0 The ‘J’ of JSR-170 is ‘Java’.\u00a0 While the overall concept of JSR-170 need not be limited to Java, that was how it was framed, but it may be limiting to any kind of cross-over acceptance. \u00a0Over the last decade Java has had many successes and can clearly be called an enterprise-level technology.\u00a0 Most of the major ECM vendors are heavily, if not predominantly, Java based in their implementations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But there are competitors to Java.\u00a0 Java is most commonly compared against the .Net equivalent language, C#.\u00a0 Actually Java has reached a phase where it is being questioned.\u00a0 Some well-known Java proponents<\/a> have even recently defected to newer technologies, like Ruby<\/a>.\u00a0 There are issues with Java as having poor performance, being too complex and just too ‘heavy’.\u00a0 Especially in the area of web development, the Java-based solutions have not been too nimble, leading to an explosion now of Java-based ‘frameworks’ that try to fill the short-comings.<\/p>\n

Because of the wide range of web technologies available for thin-client development, JSR-170, a technology framed within the Java community,\u00a0may not seem to be very compelling for Web Content Management systems that aren’t Java-based.\u00a0 One open-source attempt to create a PHP equivalent<\/a> implementation of JSR-170 does not seem to have gotten much traction.<\/p>\n

There is the issue of the difficulty in implementing technology.\u00a0 Implementation may not be ‘difficult’, but it is certainly not trivial.\u00a0\u00a0And\u00a0as with all specifications, it often takes a lot of time to ensure true compliance with\u00a0and complete understanding of\u00a0a specification document.\u00a0 More template connector code and more examples might help better seed the vendor community to motivate them to create\/contribute connectors.<\/p>\n

Finally, there is the issue that the technology is lowest-common-denominator.\u00a0 If you want to build an application on top of XYZ vendor’s technology, you’d be able to access a much richer level of functionality by using that vendor’s API rather than using the somewhat limited capabilities of JSR-170.<\/p>\n

Formtek has great interest in JSR-170.\u00a0 The capabilities of JSR-170 could lead to some very interesting applications.\u00a0 It has great potential, but it still seems to lack momentum, and\u00a0needs to\u00a0become more widespread to become very useful.\u00a0 Day’s continuing contributions to the list of available connectors may change that.<\/p>\n

The jury is out on that, but JSR-170 and Jackrabbit\u00a0has certainly generated a lot of interest.<\/p>\n

The approach that Formtek has taken towards EII has been SOA and Web Services<\/a>.\u00a0 We believe the momentum behind SOA technology is there today and at least in the short-term that this is the best approach.<\/p>\n

\"Digg<\/a><\/div>
\"Reddit<\/a><\/div>
\"Stumble<\/a><\/div>
\"Buzz<\/a><\/div>
\"Vote<\/a><\/div>
\"Share<\/a><\/div>
\"Bookmark<\/a><\/div>
\"Kick<\/a><\/div>
\"Shout<\/a><\/div>
\"Share<\/a><\/div>
\"Bookmark<\/a><\/div>
\"Post<\/a><\/div>
\"Google<\/a><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Universal access to any structured repository is a compelling concept and something that truly warrants the description of being a ‘disruptive technology’.\u00a0 It’s still a dream, but\u00a0it has become\u00a0the goal\u00a0behind many\u00a0new technologies\u00a0now operating under the name of Enterprise Information Integration…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-content-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}