JCR vs CMIS vs VCR

By nambuj - JCRLead | Posted on 2009-04-16 05:59

Previous comments on this post

By  dsshah - JCRDev | Posted on 2009-04-20 03:52

I believe VCR has been pretty old standard (or actually a BEA patent).  I remember experimenting it with a few years ago when one of our clients wanted to integrate their home grown CMS system with the BEA Weblogic Portal. Obviously, for most organizations, integration between multiple repositories and content sources (& consumers like portals) has been a big headache.  

Each of these standards has different perspective of the issue and are based on different philosophy: While CMIS thinks things of it more as an integration & integration issue alone; JCR, is inspired by hierarchical & XML database concept and is implemented with the belief that content hierarchy would be more efficient for storing and retrieving content since it more closely resembles the way content on the web is organized and published.  

Does ECM space need all these standards?  IMHO, it becomes difficult to gain industry wide support if the standard originates from an organization that has product line/services around that. Would Java, J2EE standards have been as popular as its today and more companies with product line around those standards, if Sun also initially had J2EE server product line around its standards?

CMIS has been backed by few heavy weights in the industry, and may be more attractive for the providers because it is platform independent and may require (only) an implementation of CMIS layer on top of their existing repository to be CMIS compliant. On the other hand JCR is a more thought out solution and I think it’s a natural fit for storing web 2.0 content.  It would be interesting to see how these standards evolve further and whether they can coexist.

By  nambuj - JCRLead | Posted on 2009-05-26 05:29

There is a very nice presentation by David Nuescheler, the CTO of Day Software. He has talked about the comaprison of JCR standard and CMIS standard. His words are more relevant as he's actively involved in both standard committees. 

http://www.slideshare.net/uncled/content-management-standards