CMIS support for Magnolia CMS

This autumn I've had the opportunity to work on implementing CMIS support in Magnolia CMS. CMIS stands for Content Management Interoperability Services and is a specification administered by OASIS. The goal is to improve interoperability between content management systems and it achieves this by defining a model representing the content in a repository and a set of services for accessing it. The services come in two flavors, SOAP Web Services and REST-style services using ATOM-format.

The first version of Magnolia to have CMIS support will be 4.5. The scope of the first release is to expose the DMS in Magnolia over CMIS. This means that you will be able to download, manipulate and store content in Magnolia and access Magnolia content in other CMIS enabled systems.

The implementation is based on OpenCMIS. An open source framework for implementing both server and client -side implementations. It's one of the libraries developed by Apache Chemistry. Of special interest to us is the server binding to JCR. OpenCMIS implements the services which delegates to a binding. We have extended the JCR binding to match the repository layout we use in Magnolia and integrated the OpenCMIS authentication mechanism to use our security model.

In the process we encountered a few things we wanted to improve to make OpenCMIS adaptable to our repository layout. We developed this and contributed patches that were accepted by the active and focused team working on OpenCMIS. As a result our implementation is quite minimal and mainly consists of mapping the CMIS model onto our JCR layout. The value of OpenCMIS is impressive, an entire stack with both SOAP and REST that only needs to know how to interact with the specifics of a JCR layout.

The source code for the Magnolia CMIS Module is publicly available as always.