Content Management Servers (CMS), both proprietary and open source, have been around for a very long time, but there has not been a standard way of talking to them until recently. The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard provides both an application programming interface and a search language (based on SQL-92). Today, most of the CMS systems out there support the CMIS standard.
Alfresco CMIS is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of clear step-by-step exercises, which will help you take advantage of the real power of CMIS and give you a good foundation in using it via HTTP/XML, Java, or scripting.
This practical companion will get you up to speed on CMIS in no time.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with CMIS, starts off with an introduction to the CMIS standard to quickly get you up-to-date on the service API, object model, and query language.
Chapter 2, Basic CMIS Operations, shows you how to add, update, delete, and search for content using HTTP and XML/JSON.
Chapter 3, Advanced CMIS Operations, teaches you how to version content, set permissions for content, and create relationships between content items using HTTP and XML/JSON.
Chapter 4, Alfresco and CMIS, covers specifics around the Alfresco content management server's implementation of CMIS, such as how to handle aspects, tags, and categories.
Chapter 5, Accessing a CMIS Server with a Java Client, introduces the Apache Chemistry project and the OpenCMIS Java library, which is an abstraction on top of the standard HTTP and XML/JSON protocol bindings.
Chapter 6, Accessing a CMIS Server Using Scripting Languages, shows how scripting languages such as JavaScript and Groovy can be used to talk to content management servers via the CMIS standard.
Chapter 7, System Integration with CMIS, looks at how CMIS can be used for enterprise application integration. With specific examples of how to integrate Drupal with content management servers, connect Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with one or more content management servers, and talk to the Alfresco Cloud service.
For all the chapters except the first one, you will need access to a content management server that supports CMIS, such as Alfresco. In case of Alfresco, you can use an online service available at http://cmis.alfresco.com or install the Alfresco community version from http://downloads.alfresco.com (it is recommended to have your own local server, so you have control of the content and availability).
For Chapter 2, Basic CMIS Operations, and Chapter 3, Advanced CMIS Operations, it's good to install a tool such as curl that can be used to make HTTP calls. Chapter 5, Accessing a CMIS Server with a Java Client, will require JDK and Maven installed. Chapter 6, Accessing a CMIS Server from Scripting Languages, requires the installation of jQuery and Groovy.
This book is great for developers who want to learn how to build applications that talk to content management servers in a standard way using CMIS. It will be helpful to have a bit of programming experience, but it is not necessary for the first two chapters. The OpenCMIS chapter and Alfresco Cloud section will assume some basic knowledge of Java.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "If we take Documentum as an example, its generic content type is named dm_document and not cm:content."
A block of code is set as follows:
<app:collection href=
"http://localhost:8080/alfresco/cmisatom/f0ebcfb4-ca9f-4991-bda8-9465f4f11527/types">
<cmisra:collectionType>types</cmisra:collectionType>
<atom:title type="text">Types Collection</atom:title>
<app:accept></app:accept>
</app:collection>When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
</cmisra:template>
<cmisra:type>objectbypath</cmisra:type>
<cmisra:mediatype>application/atom+xml;type=entry</cmisra:mediatype>
</cmisra:uritemplate>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ curl "http://localhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/login?u=admin&pw=admin" <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <ticket>TICKET_39ea5e46e83a6d6e43845182f4254f9de50402fb</ticket>
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."
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