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Where content meets technology

Feb 10, 2011

Nuxeo Core moving to Eclipse

I have been thinking a lot about Nuxeo's recent announcement that it is contributing Nuxeo Core to the Eclipse Foundation. First, I agree with Josette Rigsby's observation that this move could make Nuxeo the JackRabbit of CMIS. JCR watchers probably remember that Day Software's development of an open source reference implementation (Apache JackRabbit) was critical to the success of the JCR standard. Even though there are a lot of people questioning the success of the JCR standard right now, you can't argue that the JCR didn't have an impact on the Java CMS ecosystem and continues to be an important part of a number of Java CMS architectures. It would be quite a coup if Nuxeo was to be name that comes to mind when people think Java and CMIS. Alfresco has had that distinction since they were the early adopters of CMIS in the Java community and released the first CMIS implementation.

The other part of the announcement that intrigued me was why they went to the Eclipse Foundation and not the Apache Software Foundation. After all, Apache already has Chemistry, which is a collection of projects that implement the CMIS standard. My first reaction was that Nuxeo thinks the ASF is broken since its tiff with the Java Community Process. That may be so but I think there are better explanations. First, Chemistry already has a number of projects and it is still in the incubation stage. Perhaps Nuxeo feels that these aspects would dilute Nuxeo's influence. Second, Nuxeo has had a long relationship with Eclipse. Back in 2006, Nuxeo announced the Apogee project. Apogee is an RCP (an Eclipse build), designed to be a universal thick CMS client. Apogee never really caught on in the general marketplace, but I know that Nuxeo has been very successful implementing it for their customers as an efficient user interface for their own CMS. With the advantages of influence and the Eclipse Foundation's community and resources, Nuxeo Core may have great potential as the Eclipse Enterprise Content Repository Project (ECR).