Is CMIS RESTful? Or merely HYPEful?
30-Sep-2008- Submitted by: Kas Thomas, Analyst
Not long ago I blogged about the newly announced Content Management Interoperability Services specification, which is a joint effort of EMC, IBM, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, Alfresco, and Microsoft. If you close your eyes and sniff, CMIS smells a bit like JCR minus the coffee aroma. It’s a high-level spec aimed at making content repositories reachable via platform-neutral (RESTful and SOAP-based) protocols.
As such, CMIS opens the way (in theory, at least) to faster development, easier integrations between the ECM and enterprise-middleware worlds, less dependence on proprietary SDKs (thus less vendor lock-in), and so on.
At first glance, CMIS seems too good to be true. Certainly it seems well motivated (as was JSR 170, which failed to set the world on fire), and it has drawn considerable attention based on its use of technologies like Atom Publishing Protocol and REST.
But there are those who think it’s all a bit strange… including Roy T. Fielding, the father of REST.
Fielding said in his blog yesterday: “I am getting tired of big companies making idiotic claims about REST and their so-called RESTful architectures. The only similarity between CMIS and REST is that they both have four-letter acronyms.”
Continues at CMSWatch