Vendors Back Java Standard For Content Repositories

Day Software, a content management and integration vendor based in Newport Beach, Calif., initially proposed the Java Specification Request 170 in February.

"This is a good thing they're doing," said Andy Warzecha, a Meta Group analyst. "It's too early to tell whether this gets a buy-in from everybody."

There were 24 companies represented on the expert group at the teleconference on Monday. In addition to Day, content management members included BroadVision, Documentum, Interwoven and Vignette.

The API specification will focus on transactional read/write access, binary content (stream operations), textual content, full-text searching, filtering, observation, versioning and handling of hard and soft structured content, according to the proposal.

"It has the ability to increase out-of-box functionality of a lot of applications," said Roy Fielding, chief scientist for Day and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation.

The JSR 170 standard could help make proprietary content repositories obsolete, said Santi Pierini, vice president of product strategy for Vignette, which like Day does not have its own content repository but rather takes the approach of managing metadata that points to content in other repositories.

"It's going to allow us in the content management space to deliver real solutions more rapidly," Pierini said.

Interwoven also fully supports JSR 170, said Mark Hale, director of content technologies for Interwoven, which has its own repository. He said Interwoven already has an open API, which offers a full Java interface for all content management functions, and that Interwoven would work to make its APIs consistent with Java standards as they evolve.

Interwoven on Monday also said it was publishing its Web Services specification for how portals could access content services and that it planned to ask a standards body, such as OASIS, to review and adopt the specifications as an industry standard.

Interwoven said its Web Services initiative had support from BEA Systems, Bowstreet, Sun Microsystems, SAP Portals, Sybase and Tibco.

Currently, portal vendors have to develop portlets for accessing content services from each content management vendor and vice-versa. "It's been a pretty time-consuming process so that is driving a lot of need from the portal side," said Dave Homan, principal analyst at Doculabs.

He said portal vendors would likely support any initiative that promises to reduce the number of systems they have to write custom portlets for. What's missing from Interwoven's announcement is support from other content management developers, he said.

"There's some competing standards going on right now," he said. "This appears to be a single-vendor solution on the CM side. We have to wait and see how much traction it gets."

Earlier this month, Vignette said it enhanced its support for Web services in its Vignette V6 application, exposing the majority of its product functionality as a Web service.

Pierini said that would enable anyone building Web applications on top of Vignette's content management system to expose their content to customers as Web services.