JSR-170: standard worth watching
Web Content Management is notable for its dearth of industry-wide standards. But now, at the impetus of Euro-CM vendor Day, a group has formed to create a "Java Specification Request" (JSR-170 for those of you counting at home) to create a standard API for access to disparate content repositories within the J2EE environment. It would be nice indeed not to have to wait for Web Services to mature in order to write generalized APIs for interacting with content repositories across diverse server applications -- and especially nice for Day, who has staked its architecture on just this kind of interoperability. Of course, reconciling different vendor approaches here will be hard work (Interwoven and Vignette, among others, are already on board the steering group), but the effort could bear lovely fruit, and not just for Day....
Read about JCR-170 at Sun's "Java Community Process" Website