Everything you need to know to start coding integrations with a content management server such as Alfresco in a standard way

About This Book

• Understand what is unique about Alfresco's CMIS implementation and put your learning into practice
• Talk to content management servers in a standard way with HTTP, XML, JSON, and CMIS
• Understand Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) with CMIS featuring Drupal and Mule ESB

Who This Book Is For

If you are a developer who wants to learn how to build applications that talk to content management servers in a standard way using CMIS, this book is ideal for you. It will be helpful if you have a bit of programming experience, although it is not necessary.

What You Will Learn

• Add, update, delete, and search for content with increasing efficiency using HTTP and XML/JSON, OpenCMIS , JavaScript, and Groovy
• Feed content directly into a JavaScript widget from a CMIS call JSON response, so you can see how content management servers can be accessed directly via AJAX calls from a web application
• Integrate Drupal with a content management server via CMIS, so Drupal does not have to store documents and images
• Integrate multiple content management systems in a standard way via an enterprise service bus and a CMIS connector
• Handle advanced concepts such as versioning, permissions, and relationships between content items
• Talk to the Alfresco Cloud service via CMIS, so you can make content available outside the company firewall

In Detail

Content Management Servers (CMS) have been around for a very long time, both proprietary and open source ones, 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). Alfresco CMIS implementation is the basis for many existing CMIS applications, and you can use CMIS too to integrate your application with Alfresco.

Alfresco CMIS is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of clear step-by-step exercises that 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.It starts off with an introduction to the CMIS standard, in order to update you on the service API, object model, and query language.

The first part of the book explains how to use the service API with HTTP and XML/JSON; this is done in order to show that any library, system, or tool that can make HTTP calls and parse XML or JSON, is able to talk to a content management server that supports CMIS. Next, you learn to demonstrate how a higher abstraction library can be used to talk to a CMIS server in an easy way, hiding some of the complexities of the API using the OpenCMIS Java library. Since most of the applications that are built today are web applications, the book teaches readers how CMIS can be used from JavaScript and Groovy; enterprise application integration, taking Drupal and Mule as references.

Finally, you will learn how to talk to Alfresco Cloud service via CMIS!