Technology of Content

This blog post has gone through far too many iterations, and taken far too long to write! It got much shorter in the process though.

It started with an idea I had, in an innocent sort of way. I thought if I looked at the JCR specs for a bit I might find some kind of way of building a non Java interface with them. You know, maybe there might be a nice REST architecture waiting to get out. But of course there is no such thing. It is an application definition. There are not even that many ways of implementing it, other than choosing your object persistence method to be a database, file, or something else.

The REST architecture is notionally provided by another layer, such as Apache Sling, but Sling is in no way a REST layer, it is a URL dispatcher and scripting and application layer with which some REST style applications can be developed. With that you end up with a pretty heavyweight development framework, indeed together you have much of Day’s CMS offering in effect, rather than a lightweight REST repository solution.

I had a look at CMIS again. Fielding once laid into CMIS for not being REST and you can see why, although some improvements have been made since that. Although resources are discoverable through hypertext, there is a fair amount of semantics that needs to be known to understand what a type or a checkout means, and the search queries are obviously just RPC wrappers. It is not too bad though, but unfortunately the data model does not map well onto web content management right now for obvious historical document management reasons. Fixable? I think it serves a part‎icular purpose well and should probably not be forced into anything else, as we need it to succeed in its field.

Day claims that JCR is not a Java standard in an odd way, that you can implement the API in another language. Thats a strange argument to make, especially as the types are defined as Java types, and standards without interoperability are pretty vague. Without some sort of wire format or ABI this is meaningless outside the JVM world. People are making JCR like repositories in PHP but outside any standards process, so in the end this just becomes a PHP repository project; Typo3 seems to be building another, also closely aligned to JCR.

The problem with these efforts is that it is not helping the balkanization of web CMS, which is already fragmented by language and API, which is ridiculous in an industry that is about the web. The web has an architecture (REST) and an API (HTTP). Building web content management on Java APIs or PHP APIs or .NET is a legacy way of thinking; it is acceptable for document management given its role in existing enterprise architectures, but it is not going to work if we want to get widespread acceptance in web development; in the short term it is the easy path, it is what people are used to, but a forward thinking industry needs to look at defragmenting the landscape and building future proof tools.

The odd thing is that a web content repository alone surely lends itself to a simple REST architecture. Content is after all lots of small resources with relations. Hypertext. It is pretty much in presentation a fairly dumb web application, although with a fair amount going on behind the scenes. It takes content, relates it to other content, and serves it back, with authentication and versioning. Everything else is in other system layers, transforming it and so on. Not simple, but well defined; lower level than JCR + Sling say

So we need to work on a web content repository model, as a community. Process wise, it makes sense for this to sit in an organization like AIIM, as a content management based industry body. It may well be that what ends up coming out of this is more standardized architectures and semantics and open source implementations rather than the tighter prescriptions of JCR and CMIS; I have some ideas along these lines that I need to code up. I have had some discussions and there is a degree of interest in some sort of solution; who is interested? Or is infrastructure dead, everything ust wants interfaces?

Tagged: CMIS, CMS, jcr