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Should Open Source Content Management Interoperate?
bergie writes "Advogato is running a thought-provoking article on whether open source content management systems should interoperate. This is a big question involving social issues inside the projects, but also promising huge benefits to developers deploying open source CMSs and to desktop projects like Mozilla, OpenOffice and Xopus wishing to connect with a collaborative backend. This discussion will also be a major topic on the upcoming OSCOM conference."
But I don't know about how much extra work that would require. There are already several different standards on content syndication. Make sure that all open source CMS tools use these open standards and that would be a amazing step in the right direction.
Ted Tschopp
PS: Isn't that the whole idea behind Open Standards?
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Quoth the poster:
:)
i think "do it yourself" very often misses the point. not everyone has the skills or time to port every software / convert data from one format to another.
im a developer myself, and i only have time / resources to work on a few projects. when i spend my spare time i want to make sure its maximally useful. i personally consider converting data / code between platforms / applications not the best or most satisfying use of my time
re: levels of interop, i believe 20% (to pick a number) is worth it. another consideration for the adoption of standards is how much effort it takes to implement them, and what implementing a standard gives you. a example: i implemented the blogger api for postnuke. it was very simple to do. it took me about one evening, with no prior experience with XML-RPC. the payoff is that i can now use various nifty tools to blog from the desktop, or from a PDA / mobile. Standards should have these characteristics in my opinion.
Interopability would be great - the benefits in terms of acceptance and ease of use are enormous. But MS have a great advantage - as a one-stop-shop, they don't have to wait for standards to appear or discuss the best way forward with anyone else. How do we get these systems to interoperate without slowing progess, and what happens when someone wants to use this cool new feature that just hasn't been introduced into the interoperability protocol yet ? It's a good goal in the long term, but it shouldn't hold back progress and new ideas in the short term.
Drupal is an open source content management app run by sites such as DebianPlanet. A couple of examples: if you have a Jabber account, Drupal can authenticate through XML-RPC and through a Jabber server. Also, Drupal allows for utilization of the Blogger API for the posting of content.
Well, in the case of Exchange and co. it's not so much interoperation as integration, which is not a bad thing either.
The catch is of course that it's hard to achieve that out in the open world of free/open software, since no one has any leverage over the other. This is one of those points coming from Microsoft, that do have some truth in it. Of course, the other problem there is that you can't achieve the same level of integration because of incomplete/misleading/missing documentation, but that's beside the point.
My point is that going for interoperation/integration is not without a "cost". It's similar to PC and Mac situation. You can either go for relatively bigger freedom and lower price or you can choose a more integrated system.
To achieve interoperability with something else, you have to agree on interfaces (whatever that means in particular context) and it follows from this directly that you are not completely free to choose and create them as you please and so you added another limitation on the list that you have to take account of when you design and create. How much you are limited depends on how complex the interface is and how close integration you want. And there are other issues you have to consider as well (limited time and your personal energy for example).
It's a matter of choice.
Ok,
Let's take DCOM, PHP, ASP, XML, SQL, ActiveX, DirectX, Flash, LISP, Perl give them a whirl add a chicken for lustre some hot-peppers for muster and then dethrone eXchange, explain to people that theier only choice is Linux and make the punishment for useing windows the loss of your hands.
Realistcily people like Outlook, they like exchange and they do not like change the public containts too many windows peons for that kind of change to happen.
Oddly enough exchange is a stripped down version of X.400 with X.500 extensions thrown in for good measure (Look ma no UNIX!). Microsoft has always taken current technology, re-branded it given it a nice gui (if you like puke grey!) and re-sold it to the would be managers/ceo's/cio's and marketing people. Another perfect example of the drop re-tool and replace (BSD's 4.2 TCP stack is in both windows 2000 and WinXP). Please correct me if I am wrong.
Group Ware from a coroporate stand point should always cost money, most of the managers I know maintain the belief that a tool is as good as it's price. Or more concisely "you pay for what you get", and then you pay for what you didn't get too. Realistcly people like windows it keeps them in the comfortable world of I neither know nor care obout my antiquated kernel with crappy drivers and an HAL that reeks of 5 years ago.
P.S. HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer).
Then again I should be one to talk, I am a OS zelot and I hope to help with this ever so monumental task of replaceing all of DCOM. But what of security? Will it be Kmail? Or Pine? Which one will get the ever so useful access to theis new form of OPENDCOM? And how long before the same problems hit all those nice mandrake/Suse/redhat installations?
I hope it works, and I hope people learn to trust open soucre, but I have been let down by OS my self a few times.
Three Letters "XML" that exists so why not just make everything comply!
Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment ~Tesla
Why can't WebDAV be the standard? From what I have seen WebDAV has a lot of the needed functionaility for a CMS. Jakarta Slide (Open Source Java CMS) is implementing WebDAV as their foundation.
Their is no problems that a level of indirection can't solve.
I'd rather be sailing...
Why can't WebDAV [webdav.org] be the standard?
Because many people don't want a web-based solution?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I cannot comment on the specific articles because even Google cache is slashdotted right now.
Anyhow, the idea that web content, file management, and databases are all different things should perhaps be challenged.
Hierarchical file systems are too rigid IMO, databases charge fat bucks for document management, and web content managers assume that the web world is an island away from other company activities.
I suggest ways be found to combine all these. XML is not the answer because it is linear: you can't "index" by an aspect or relationship not covered in an XML file layout/hierarchy. (If you could, then it would be a database and not an XML file, per se, and nobody has shown that an XML database is better than a document management database or a relational database or whatever. Besides, XML is an exchange format, not really a good storage format.)
Basically, everthing can be reduced to 2 things: "documents" and "attributes". Relational databases do a pretty good job at attribute management [1], but not document management, at least not without addons.
Thus, we need to find a standard protocol for referencing and querying a "big pool of data" based on documents and attributes. Then "content databases" can be built.
[1] There is kind of a mini battle between "defined attributes" and "open-ended" attributes. RDBMS tend to want to know field names in advanced. But it does not have to be that way. But, there are pro's and con's to each approach, defined attributes usually result in better performance, but make it harder to add new fields not anticipated in advanced.
Table-ized A.I.
What if a large corporation sponsored it? Whould that change people perception? light a fire under some people? Also give some perspective to what is needed in a true enterprise content management system?
What is multiple large companies, possibly including one or two current commercial content mgt systems were involved? Would this be the golden egg that gets people to interop?
I think this is desperately needed and I bet if approached properly you may get buy in from some companies who are looking to jump on the Open source bandwagon.
larz