In a move that hints at challenges for mid-market ECM providers, European-based Nuxeo, a provider of open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, has released Nuxeo Core 1.0. This is the first release of their embeddable content services core software and the foundation of the upcoming Nuxeo 5 Enterprise CMS platform.

Nuxeo Core provides all the services and functionalities needed to build a complete ECM product. It offers a repository model, documents storage management, schemas and document type management, a query service, a security model, a document life cycle service, and a flexible core event service.

This component is designed as the content services engine for the upcoming Nuxeo 5 Enterprise CMS product. Nuxeo 5 will have two main bundles — the Enterprise Platform (EP) based on Nuxeo Core and the Nuxeo Runtime, and the the Rich Client Platform (RCP), which is a development framework based Eclipse RCP and Microsoft Office tools. Nuxeo RCP is intended to facilitate rich client (desktop) application development of document management or collaboration software.

Nuxeo is developed with cutting edge open source technologies including Java 5, Apache Jackrabbit JCR, JBoss application server, JBoss Seam, jBPM, JBoss Rules, JSF, EJB3, etc. It additionally makes use of the Apache Lucene search engine and development tools such as Eclipse, Ant, and Maven.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again — keep your eye on Europe — and in this case, the interesting Open Source CMS offerings emerging and evolving there. Nuxeo has been and continues to be a pioneer, especially in France, in the Professional Open Source movement, alongside companies like Red Hat, JBoss, and MySQL.

Today it is part of the third generation of open source software vendors at the applicative-level software stack (after the OS level and the infrastructure and middleware levels).

The company lists an impressive number of release goals for Nuxeo Core 1.0, that if proven to perform, could bring this offering out of Paris to front and center globally as an ECM solution.

1.0 release goals include:

• Providing the common services needed to build a state-of-the-art ECM product, competing with offerings of Documentum, FileNet or OpenText
• Leveraging existing open source infrastructure components, like the Apache Jackrabbit JCR implementation, the Lucene search engine, and the OSGi components framework
• Remote or local accessibility (a common API accessible both from a the local JVM or from a remote instance)
• Deployable anywhere without any modification (through Nuxeo Runtime), either in a Java EE application server like JBoss, or embedded in a desktop application like an RCP Eclipse application
• Extensible and flexible; this is inherited from Nuxeo Runtime which provides an extensible component model

Nuxeo Core v1.0

Source code for Nuxeo Core 1.0 is available via the Nuxeo SVN repository. Packaged binaries built for JBoss AS and Eclipse RCP are also available. Finally both a demo application embedding Nuxeo Core (pre-built for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X) and a Developers Guide are available from the community website.

As with other Open Source CMS projects, Nuxeo development is a collaborative effort by a community of enthusiasts. This effort is guided by Paris-based Nuxeo SAS, the primary force behind the project and a commercial open source software vendor with offices in Paris, England, Africa, and Romania.