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Where content meets technology

Oct 03, 2008

Roy Fielding to CMIS: You don't know REST

Roy Fielding, creator of REST puts a nice smack down on CMIS's claim of being RESTfull.

When CMIS was first announced, everyone looked at Day Software whose CTO, David Nuescheler, was the main driver behind the Java Content Repository Standard (JSRs 170 and 283). Of course, Day's response was gracious. David write a congratulatory blog post and released this official quote:

"As three of the largest players in the ECM market, IBM, EMC and Microsoft are well qualified to initiate a protocol specification for content management interoperability that is complementary to a programming API like JCR," said David Nuescheler, CTO of Day Software. "Day Software is happy to actively contribute to the specification, which we view as a validation of our standardization and infrastructure efforts over the last three years. CMIS mirrors JSR 170 in that it is platform-agnostic, appealing to a mixture of languages and technologies. We congratulate the group and look very much forward to participating by contributing our JCR and REST knowledge and experience to future versions of the specification. We welcome CMIS as a high-level content protocol that transcends any one programming language, and see it as a win for the entire industry."

Roy, whose role at Day is Chief Scientist, was less constrained by politeness. Not only does he take CMIS to task for not living up to its RESTful claims, he also calls out the CMIS team for jumping the gun on calling it a "standard."

Ouch!