David,
thanks for this. From the peanut gallery (Troy McLure moment: hi
Jackrabbits, you might remember me for being an initial mentor of
Jackrabbit, and being dragged away since graduation, yet keeping a
place in my heart for the project) I have been both interested and
quite skeptical about CMIS: maybe it's just me being an old fart, but
I love protocols more than I fancy APIs, still I can see how CMIS has
a fair deal of shortcomings.
Having said that:
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 7:17 PM, David Nuescheler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I am currently working in a technical committee on OASIS defining a
document management interoperability specification called CMIS [1].
CMIS shoots for a protocol level interoperability between applications
and various repository vendors.
The specification is in a very early stage and a lot of things
need to be addressed [2], but it has peeked the interest of a number
of people at Apache already.
Yup, that would include myself - again as an optimist hoping that
major CMIS issues might get addressed. Also, you might count on a
number of engineers in my organization (disclosure: that'll be
www.sourcesense.com) who are very much interested in the proposed
standard: we have already been thinking about ways to get our hands
dirty, and this sounds like a great opportunity.
Since functionally the CMIS specification is a subset of the
JCR specification it allows a very simple and straight-forward mapping to
a fully compliant JCR repository such as Jackrabbit.
Indeed. Not to mention that, as you righteously note, having a CMIS
implementation working against the JCR RI should be useful to all
those repositories exposing a JCR layer, so I can clearly smell useful
stuff.
Similar to the existing protocol layers (webdav etc) on top of
JCR that are already part of Jackrabbit, I would like to propose
that we initiate first tests with an implementation in a sandbox
project.
I think that there are going to be a lot of benefits from such
an implementation. First it will allow any JCR implementation
to be CMIS compliant automatically (once the specification
is released ;) ) and allow us to find the issues to be fixed
in the specification itself and drive it into a good direction.
That alone is a noble and worthwhile goal. I do believe that a wire
protocol could be really useful to the CM world and, assuming that the
TC sees the light and doesn't come up with a white elephant, I can see
value in the ASF being the good steward of an implementation providing
guidance, critique, feedback and continuous reality check to the spec
writers.
Let me know what you think.
FWIW, I would applaud at that effort and would be following it
closely. Happy to help, if help is needed!
Thanks,
--
Gianugo Rabellino
M: +44 779 5364 932 / +39 389 44 26 846
Sourcesense - making sense of Open Source: http://www.sourcesense.com
