CMIS Demonstration by Alfresco and Joomla

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Alfresco has an interesting online demonstration of a content management integration done in partnership with Joomla. It shows a Joomla website talking with an Alfresco ECM back-end. Users of the Joomla website can walk the folder structure of the Alfresco content.

This was done using the draft version of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. What is most interesting to think about is the flexibility this might enable. Either Joomla or Alfresco could be replaced:

• The Alfresco back-end could be replaced with another CMIS-compliant ECM (without changing code on the Joomla site).
• The Joomla front-end could be replaced with another CMIS-compliant application or website (without changing code on the Alfresco site).

What’s missing are details behind authentication between the two systems, which CMIS does not define. Presumably the http channel would be secured using various available methods. Nevertheless, this is impressive and shows how CMIS has the potential to become a major step forward in interoperable content services.

The Alfresco/Joomla test-drive site is here. More details are available from this Alfresco press release.

Update: Johan Janssens has more details at the Joomlatools blog.

Comments

[Johan Janssens]

Good point about the authentication. At the moment the CMIS spec only specifies basic authentication, other authentication methods like digest authentication are not yet part of the spec but are expected to be added.

Authentication could be secured in two ways, you could setup and https connection or you could create a account in alfresco that has limited access as we have done for the demo installation. Hope this helps.

Best,

Johan Janssens
http://www.joomlatools.org

[Ravin]

Can you step by step indicate how actually this connection is implemented please.