Can CMIS handle browser CRUD?

I've mentioned before the need for concrete user narratives (user stories) describing the intended usages of CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services, soon to be an OASIS-blessed standard API for content management system interoperability). When you don't have user stories to tie to your requirements, you tend to find out things later on that you wished you'd found out earlier. That seems to be the case now with browser-based CRUD operations in CMIS.

I don't claim to be an expert on CMIS (what I know about CMIS would fill a very small volume, at this point), but in reading recent discussions on org.oasis-open.lists.cmis, I've come across a very interesting issue, which is that (apparently) it's not at all easy to upload a file, or fetch a file and its dependent files (such as an HTML page with its dependent CSS files), from a CMIS repository using the standard Atom bindings.

The situation is described (in a discussion list thread) by David Nuescheler this way: "The Atom bindings do not lend themselves to be consumed by a lightweight browser client and for example cannot even satisfy the very simple use-case of uploading a file from the browser into a CMIS repository. Even simple read operations require hundreds of lines of JavaScript code."

Part of the problem is that files in the repository aren't natively exposed via a path, so you can't get to a file using an IRI with a normal file and path name like "./main.css" or "./a/b/index.html" or whatever. Instead, files have an ID in the repository (e.g., /12257894234222223) which is assigned
by the repository when you create the file. That wouldn't be so bad, except that there doesn't appear to be an easy way (or any way) to look up a URL using an ID (see bug CMIS-169).

Based on the difficulty encountered in doing browser CRUD during the recent CMIS Plugfest, David Nuescheler has proposed looking into adding an additional binding based on JSON GETs for reading and multi-part POSTs for writing -- which would make it possible to do at least some CMIS operations via AJAX. The new binding would probably be called something like the web-, browser-, or mashup-binding. (Notice how the name "REST" is nowhere in sight -- for good reason. CMIS as currently implemented is not how REST is supposed to work.)

Granted, CMIS was not originally designed with browser mashups in mind, but the fact is, that's where most of the traction is going to come from if the larger ecosystem of web developers decides to latch onto CMIS in a big way. SOAP has a dead-horse stench about it; no one I know likes to deal with it; but an Atom binding isn't a very useful alternative if the content you need can't be addressed or can't easily be manipulated in the browser using standard AJAX calls.

So let's hope the CMIS technical committee doesn't overlook the most important use-case of all: CMIS inside the browser. Java and .NET SOAP mashups are important, but let's face it, from this point forward all the really important stuff needs to happen in the browser. If you can't do browser CRUD with a new content-interoperability standard, you're starting life with the umbilical cord wrapped around your neck.