The Apache Software foundation has announced that Apache Chemistry has graduated to become a top-level project.
Apache Chemistry is an Open Source implementation of the OASIS CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) standard. Originally created by EMC Corporation, IBM and Microsoft, the CMIS specification became an OASIS specification on May 1, 2010. Many of the Apache Chemistry code committers are also members of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee.
CMIS provides an interface for an application to access a content management repository. To do so it defines a core data model which describes the persistent information entities that are managed by the repository, along with a set of Web Services and RESTful AtomPub bindings that can be used by the application to work with one or more repositories/systems.
A number of vendors now provide content management and portal products with CMIS-compliant repositories. These include Alfresco, EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, Microsoft SharePoint, Nuxeo, and OpenText Enterprise Library Services.
As well as providing an interoperable API to CMIS repositories, Apache Chemistry also offers libraries to build CMIS-compliant repository connectors. It is widely used in enterprise content management solutions. The main Java-based OpenCMIS Chemistry sub-project is deployed in both Open Source and commercial products and solutions by Adobe, Alfresco, Metaversant, Nuxeo, OpenText, OpenWGA, and SAP, among others.
In addition to the Java sub-project Apache Chemistry is working to support other languages including PHP, Python and the .NET family of languages, with the Python version currently the most advanced. Florent Guillaume, Head of R&D at Nuxeo said
We have supported Chemistry from the start, and we are so confident in the technology that we have included it as a core connector for the Nuxeo Enterprise Platform. Through Chemistry, many software platforms, such as Java, Python, PHP, and .NET, will be able to adopt the CMIS specification, which benefits both servers storing content documents or other assets, and the applications interacting with them.
As with all Apache projects, the code is licensed under the Apache Software License v2.0.