JSR170

"The API should be a standard, implementation independent, way to access content bi-directionally on a granular level within a content repository. A Content Repository is a high-level information management system that is a superset of traditional data repositories. A content repository implements "content services" such as: author based versioning, full textual searching, fine grained access control, content categorization and content event monitoring. It is these "content services" that differentiate a Content Repository from a Data Repository.

Many of today's (web)applications are interacting with a content repository in various ways.

This API proposes that content repositories have a dedicated, standard way of interaction with applications that deal with content. This API will focus on transactional read/write access, binary content (stream operations), textual content, full-text searching, filtering, observation, versioning, handling of hard and soft structured content

Today, (web) applications have to adapt to every vendor's proprietary API to interact with content repositories. This has the negative effect of locking a large percentage of information assets in vendor specific formats, limiting access to information, impacting system evolution/migration, and availability of third party content management tools. This API will examine solutions to these and other issues deemed important by the expert group.

There is no easy way to integrate content-producer-applications (CMS) and content-consumer-applications (CRM, Personalization, Portal, etc.) independently of the actual underlying content repository. The expert group will examine solutions to this problem also.

The Content Industry has defined a number of specifications on a protocol level to exchange content (ICE, WebDAV, etc.). However, there is no specification on an API level that addresses the unique requirements of a Content Repository. As well, there exists no Content Repository centric standard that appears to address issues such as version handling, full-text searching, and event-monitoring in a coherent manner.

Of course, existing standards will be utilized/referenced for various components. For example, JMS or JTA will be used/referenced in this standard. Numerous existing standards/drafts (EJB, EMB, JDBC, JDO, XML-DOM, etc.) with a certain amount of overlap will be taken into account wherever possible. Never the less, none of the standards cover the full range of described issues around Content Repositories."
Java Community Process Org