#jboye09 8 Key Trends in Web Content Management Architecture and Standards

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Nov 5, 2009

#jboye09 Top 8 Trends in Web Content Management Architecture and Standards

On the last day of the J. Boye 2009 Conference, Aarhus heard its mayor’s plea and slightly warmed/dried up. The event folk exclaimed, “It’s almost summer!”

The rather standard for this time of the year weather was followed by the web content management standards talk. David Nüscheler, the CTO of Day Software, presented his take on the top WCM trends for 2010 from the architecture and standards standpoint.

1. Ciao, Vendor Lock-in

The first 2010 WCM trend identified by Nüscheler was around Web CMS vendor lock-in as a business problem. He said the content users create and contribute back into a content repository should be protected from being locked into any particular vendor.

Introducing the Content Management cloud (that includes WCM, DM, DAM, RM, Social Collaboration and other CM aspects), Nüscheler pointed out that there are many different use cases there, yet very little agreement in this sphere. Worry not, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

All disciplines of content management do agree on, at least, one thing: the notion of a content repository (CR). They also agree on a feature set that should be found in any CR. And that is RDBMS (== transactions, queries, etc.) + file system (== binaries, access, etc.) + “other good stuff you always wanted” like versioning and unstructured content management.

With a quick tour in the past, Nüscheler gave an overview of the history of standards from the goodies and oldies like DMA and WebDAV to the newest ones like JCR and CMIS.

J. Boye '09 — David Nüscheler Discussing Standards

Being the JCP spec lead for the now official JSR-283 spec (the successor of JSR-170), Nüscheler — of course — talked about JCR adoption and success tracking. JCR became synonymous to "content repository" over the past several years, but the adoption is not driven by how many vendors support the standard, but by how many applications are using the standard to build on top of.

Day CRX and Apache Jackrabbit were mentioned as some of the known compliant repositories along with many others like IBM, Alfresco, Interwoven, Vignette, etc. A considerable number of known JCR applications filled the next slide in the presentation.

Moving onto CMIS — which Nüscheler is also working on in collaboration with several other content management vendors — noted that JCR and CMIS are complementary to each other with different scopes and goals. Nüscheler, referring to himself as a liaison between JCR (a Java spec) and CMIS (a protocol spec), stressed the notion of CMIS, in essence really being DMIS, with its focus on Document Management, and JCR being a general purpose content repository model.

While there’s a compatibility framework between the two, the main differentiator is that JCR is a content repository infrastructure, whereas CMIS is more about integration and interoperability. However, let’s not forget the link between the two — Apache Chemistry — that automatically turns any JCR-compliant repository into a CMIS-compliant one.

2. Apps are Sites, Sites are Apps

In the past, there was a big gap between people administrating web apps and those managing web sites, but they need to come together, said Nüscheler. We need to see a seamless integration of web applications (be it portals, business or e-commerce apps) into web sites, should be able to mash it up with an ease of a drag-and-drop of any application into any web site.