Accessing Metadata via API with WCM

[sl972]

I am interested in using Alfresco to control content for a high traffic website.  The content would consist of Articles, Images, and Vids.  The metadata associated with each item would be used intensively through the application.

We would like to be able to access the metadata from our application servers without having an Alfresco instance running in the same JVM on every web server.

We are curious how we would access lists of published content and associated metadata from a remote JVM. 

Is the data created by WCM stored with Metadata in the database and content on the filesystem as documented by the Alfresco Content Repository Architecture?  Can you still use the JCR API or Web Services to retrieve metadata, or is the AVM API the only option?

[kevinr]

You could use our HTTP API - the AVM API is available in Javascript/Freemarker so you can write a WebScript service that returns what you want over http. Might be simplier easier to modify than say webservices.
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Web_Scripts

Thanks,

Kevin