Apache Chemistry has moved from the incubation phase to a Top-Level Project, according to not-for-profit Apache Software Foundation. The open source implementation toolkit provides an interoperable API to the Content Management Interoperability Services standard, developed by OASIS, and provides content libraries to build CMIS-compliant repository connectors.

Chemistry provides an API to CMIS repositories such as Alfresco, EMC Documentum, IBM (NYSE: IBM) FileNet, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) SharePoint, Nuxeo and OpenText Enterprise Library Services.

Chemistry's standard interface makes integrating a CMIS system with another application much simpler for vendors, said Nathan McMinn, Software Engineer at Ansell in a statement. "Chemistry gives us the tools we need to connect most of our major platforms (based on PHP, Python and Java) to our existing content stores," he said.  

The open source CMIS toolkit also let's users do more with content, no matter where it's located across the enterprise, explained Richard Anstey, VP of Product Management at OpenText.

Two Chemistry sub-projects are now complete: OpenCMIS and cmislib. OpenCMIS is comprised of CMIS client and server libraries for Java and developer test tools, and cmislib provides a CMIS client library for Python. The flagship sub-project, OpenCMIS, has been adopted by open source and proprietary solutions by Adobe, Alfresco, Nuxeo, OpenText and SAP, among others. Two soon-to-be-released sub-projects include phpclient and DotCMIS.

Chemistry began incubation, back in May 2009, as a single, Java-focused project. At the time, many OASIS Technical Committee members working on CMIS specification said it only made sense to create an open source version of the project. Not only did Chemistry bring consistency to CMIS implementation, the project is vendor-neutral and shared.

For more:
- see the Apache press release

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