Nuxeo's Take on Apache CMIS Implementation aka Chemistry

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) May 1, 2009

Well, good news! Since we discussed Chemistry with David Nuescheler — Day Software's CTO and one of Chemistry committers — the CMIS implementation project has been officially incubated at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

Now, let's do some Chemistry with another major contributor to the project — open source enterprise CMS vendor, Nuxeo, and its head of R&D Florent Guillaume.

Questions and Answers…

CMSWire: Why is the Enterprise Content Management vendor Nuxeo interested in CMIS and Chemistry? What value do you see?

Florent Guillaume: Nuxeo, as an open source vendor, values interoperability a lot. And this is not just marketing-speak, we see CMIS as a key factor for customers who need a standardized way of accessing Nuxeo repositories from their applications without learning proprietary protocols or APIs.

Conversely, CMIS will also allow customers to migrate data from other repositories, provided their vendors adopt CMIS as well. The more CMIS adoption we see, the more people will be able to make educated choices based on the intrinsic merits of a product, instead of being locked into their previous platforms and having to do costly product renewals because no clear transition path exists for them.

Chemistry for us is an opportunity to promote standard adoption by providing a library of a well-defined API and an exhaustive coverage of the CMIS specification. Chemistry will be a bridge between different protocols and backends, following the CMIS domain model.

CMSWire: How did your pre-Apache CMIS implementation come along?

Florent Guillaume: We started working on a CMIS prototype in January, to investigate technical feasibility and gauge the level of complexity of a basic implementation. As a prototype it proved a success, and some useful bits of that code base will be moved to Chemistry in the near future.

CMSWire: Why did you decide to partner with Day and combine your two CMIS implementation code bases into Chemistry?

Florent Guillaume: Through their involvement in the Jackrabbit project, Day had shown exemplar commitment to open standards and to the Apache Software Foundation. At the CMIS face-to-face meeting in January, David Nuescheler of Day had presented slides about his vision of a generic CMIS layer bridging clients and servers in a modular fashion.

The prototype that Dominique Pfister (Day) and Paolo Mottadelli (SourceSense) had produced for the face-to-face was, however, very much tied to the JCR.

Following these ideas, but beginning from scratch, I decided in February to start working on a repository-independent Java API that could then be bridged in both directions to clients or servers, as desired — this became the Chemistry project.

Now that it has visibility through Jackrabbit and the incubator, more people have joined the effort, starting with Dominique, Paolo, and David of course but also a number of others.

CMSWire: What is your relationship with the ASF? Why do you think it'll benefit CMIS to be an Incubator project?

Florent Guillaume: We're big users of Apache libraries, but up until now we hadn't been involved as committers in ASF projects. OK, I'm lying, actually I have a bit of a forgotten history with the Apache HTTP Server project, you'll find my name on the httpd contributors page.