Thomas Kas Thomas

CMIS gets new momentum, thanks to Chemistry

27-Apr-2009

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Web Content and Experience Management, Industry Standards, Open Source

There's been an interesting development with regard to Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS, the new, yet-to-be-ratified content API being considered by OASIS). The Apache Foundation, it turns out, has begun incubating a new project, called Chemistry, which aims to produce a generic, open-source "reference implementation" of CMIS.

According to the Chemistry wiki: "Apache Chemistry is an effort to provide a Java (and possibly others, like JavaScript) implementation of an upcoming CMIS specification, consisting of a high-level API for developers wanting to manipulate documents, a low-level SPI [Service Provider Interface] close to the CMIS protocol for developers wanting to implement a client or a server, and default implementations for all of the above. Chemistry aims to cover both the AtomPub and SOAP bindings defined by the CMIS specifications."

Some months ago, Day Software tried to drum up interest in a CMIS-to-JCR bridge layer as part of Apache Jackrabbit (the well-known JCR reference implementation). But a more generic (non-JCR) open-source CMIS implementation, led by Florent Guillaume and other Nuxeo employees, began to gather momentum before the CMIS-JCR bridge effort had a chance to get very far. Soon enough, the two companies realized that rather than duplicate each other's efforts, it might be better to combine efforts on a larger, joint effort (not tied to JCR) hosted by Apache. The name Chemistry was chosen, in part, because it contains the letters 'CMIS.'

Committers on the project include five developers from Nuxeo, two from Day, and one each from Alfresco and European Open Source systems integrator SourceSense.

We see this as yet another indication (if any was needed) of the broad base of support behind CMIS. What will be interesting to see is whether any of the large commercial vendors who are backing CMIS (such as Microsoft, Open Text, and EMC) will contribute code to the Chemistry project -- and then use it once it's released. The potential exists for commercial vendors to adapt the Chemistry code for their own use. The alternative, of course, is for those vendors to reinvent the wheel in-house. That costs time and ultimately money. And the costs are passed on to (guess who?) you, the consumer.

We'll keep you posted, whichever way it goes.

 

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