CMIS Interoperability

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CMS Wire recently picked up the development of CMIS Explorer by Shane Johnson (@shane_dev) at CityTech. CMIS Explorer (download) is a browser application written in Adobe AIR and Flex that uses the RESTful AtomPub binding of the proposed CMIS standard to interact with CMIS-compliant repositories.

Already early access support for CMIS is available from EMC, IBM and Alfresco. Such support makes it possible for applications like CMIS Explorer to be applied to a variety of content repositories in ways not possible before CMIS.

As fellow OASIS CMIS TC member Florent Guillaume from Nuxeo comments, though, CMIS is not yet a formal (fixed) standard. It is under development and somewhat fluid.

When a content repository vendor provides draft support, don’t assume that such support fully conforms to the current draft specification (e.g. v0.5). If you’re an application developer like Shane, you can know conformance exists by first building against what is specified on the OASIS site for CMIS and then pointing your application at desired content repository or repositories.

For example, you can point CMIS Explorer at a Documentum content repository via EMC CMIS support EA2 to search and to see types.

Searching a Docbase via CMIS Explorer

Reviewing Docbase types via CMIS Explorer

However, while basic interoperability seems OK, something prevents actual browsing functionality in CMIS Explorer from working with Documentum. In its com.citytechinc.cmis.Repository.setFolder() method, CMIS Explorer tries to get folder objects from root children via the following condition:
f.object.properties.propertyString.(@name=='BaseType').value == "folder"
However, draft CMIS specification v0.5 does not define a BaseType property, not does the EMC CMIS support EA2 contain this property. As a result, CMIS Explorer cannot find any folder object in root children, which prevents it from being able to browse a Docbase.

To be fair, my colleague, Norrie Quinn, has already pointed out this matter on Shane’s post, and Shane has replied.

My focus here is simply as follows: It’s important for applications to leverage the currently proposed CMIS bindings from OASIS rather than a particular vendor’s implementation of these bindings in order to promote interoperability.

It will be good to see the emergence of CMIS-based applications that go beyond exploration, navigation and portal-style user experiences. Such applications will help to influence the CMIS roadmap beyond version 1.0.

In the meantime, it’s great to see open source efforts like CMIS Explorer take root today. Thanks, Shane.

P.S. It would be good to see a community form around CMIS-based application development (e.g. shine a light on individual efforts, potentially pool interest and resources, solicit ideas and challenges, etc.). If you’re interested in something like, please leave me a comment. In the meantime, I plan to promote community efforts here as best I can. Thanks.

-Craig
http://craigrandall.net/
@craigsmusings

10 thoughts on “CMIS Interoperability”

  1. Craig, looks like we are doing the same thing today. Still trying to get them to work, but I’ve got to validate a few things. What was your value for the Repository?

  3. Got things working, sort-of. Now I’m authenticating 10-ways from Sunday. I did get some communication established though.

    -Pie

  4. Hi Laurence. I’m assuming that you’re working on the AIIM interop environment. Please keep track of any interop issues you run into so that the OASIS TC can consider each in due time. When you say “10-ways from Sunday,” can you be more specific? Is this is a user management problem?

    Update 3/4/2009: For any issues that appear to be specific to the EMC early access CMIS support, please leverage the labs discussion area. I see that you already, Pie. Thanks.

  5. Hi Craig. While the spec is fluid, I think it’s expected that early adopter clients / providers will hit spec ambiguities and omissions. The issue you highlight is an example of ambiguity.

    Thankfully, there are publicly available providers and consumers that help tease out these issues.

    Re: community. There’s a CMIS community currently growing on Twitter. I recommend that interested parties at least use twitter’s search capability to keep up-to-date.

    I’m also keeping a directory of known CMIS providers and clients at http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/CMIS#Known_Implementations_of_CMIS

  7. Hi Dave. No disagreement. That’s why I advised as I did above and didn’t point any fingers. :-) Having another interop plugfest like was done during August of last year will be good, too. Cheers…

  8. Craig, getting prompted to authenticate my REST resource, but if I just hit enter, and no authentication information, it all goes away.

    You should get on Twitter and keep up with things.

    And don’t worry, I’ll be sharing my observations with everyone so that it works everywhere.

    (btw, did the new version of CMIS Explorer work better for you?)

  9. I’m @craigsmusings on Twitter, and, yes, I need to actually start tweeting.

    @shane_dev was quick to address the issue in CMIS Explorer. At least between SVN revision 16 (time of issue report) and revision 31 (current as of this comment) there is no more basis upon BaseType.

    Looking forward to your observations…

  10. Still don’t have the Browser feature working, but I don’t need it currently. I am no longer getting the prompt when I use CMIS Explorer, so I figure I’m in good shape now. It may have been a combined quirk between the older version and Tomcat.

    Now to throw another system up.

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