I attended an SAI seminar on CMIS yesterday, starring a presentation by Joeri Samson and Stijn Van Vreckem from XAOP. The term ‘CMIS’ (“Content Management Interoperability Services“) is gaining notoriety these days, now that Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems are being contemplated and installed in an increasing number of enterprises and public services. CMIS can be an effective tool to bridge old and new ECMs, as well as a means to englobe multiple compliant ECMs for diverse purposes like search, archiving, etc.
One of the questions that popped up after the presentation was: How should we compare CMIS to the Java Content Repository (JCR, specified in JSR 170 and JSR 283)? I knew that the JCR is CMIS-compatible, but just to be sure I did some checking today. And the answer to the question is, of course, that the two are not competitors, but complementary technologies. In short:
- The JCR is, as the name says, a generic ‘content repository’ (a data store) with an extensive Java API.
- CMIS is essentially a protocol to talk to any CMIS-compliant content repository, not just in Java, but in any of many programming languages.
And yes, any good JCR implementation is CMIS-compliant: here’s David Nuescheler introducing both technologies. No, you won’t be able to do all that is possible in the JCR through a CMIS browser, but you’ll be able to consult and update objects in the repository, just like for any other CMIS-compliant repository. CMIS is still evolving, by the way: version 2 of the standard is being validated these days, so I suppose an more powerful CMIS is coming in the very near future.
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