This is a continuation of a discussion that was started in the Manning Forums established to discuss the CMIS & Apache Chemistry book. In the <a href="https://www.manning-sandbox.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58071&tstart=0">original thread</a>, a reader states that they want a CMIS-compliant back-end for their Grails app. They looked at Apache Chemistry, and of course the In-Memory Server and the File Server are not meant for production use. They looked at Alfresco and felt like it was too heavy for what they needed, which was simply CRUD functions for content.
I suggested an idea around a "CMIS Server". It's something I've thought might be interesting for quite a while but haven't had time to do anything about. An Alfresco CMIS Server would be just that: Start with Alfresco and strip it down to only what you need to be CMIS compliant. Maybe leave in Web Scripts so that you could add your own RESTful URLs to fill gaps where CMIS doesn't cover your needs.
I proposed stripping out: - Alfresco Explorer - Alfresco Share and Surf - jBPM - Activiti - AVM (the old WCM product) - Solr
I'd consider also stripping out: - Any auth-related code not needed to support CMIS/Web Scripts - All of the file protocol support (IMAP, SMTP, FTP, WebDAV, CIFS). I could be convinced to leave in WebDAV. - Transformations (although this would probably be better left in because thumbnailing is a common request and CMIS supports renditions) - Metadata extraction (again, might be good to leave in)
What you'd be left with would be a smaller, lighter server that would still work with CMIS clients and could be extended where needed. Sort of an Apache Jackrabbit plus Apache Sling that is okay for production use and built on CMIS instead of JCR.
A first cut at this might be achievable through packaging and some spring config. I'm not sure because I haven't tried it yet.
Two of the readers seemed interested. I figured we move the discussion over to here and see if anyone else has any thoughts or ideas on the topic.
..Would be a very welcome option for us. That Apache Chemistry / CMIS book from Manning is awesome and a fully functional, yet scaled back version of Alfresco (with its configurable content model) would be great to go along with it.
