Gentics Mesh, a capable Open Source Headless CMS built on OrientDB

The headless CMS market is exploding, and there are some interesting open source alternatives like Directus and soon GraphCMS. Contentful is in the lead for proprietary options, but there is room for open source. Another new option is GraphQL enabled Gentics Mesh.

This area of content management certainly hot right now, with universal JavaScript platforms providing perfect melting pots for content and data from various systems. There are plenty of options like the abovementioned Directus and GraphCMS, but no clear market leader like WordPress or Drupal has emerged in the headless space.

Together with the trend is growing a universally adopted alternative to RESTful APIs, a technology originating from Facebook called GraphQL. In this area GraphQL enabled CMSes are of particular interest to many because of the simplicify of the API (Application Programming Interface) provided by the technique.

100% Open Source, powered by OrientDB

A new entrant to the market is Gentics Mesh. This tool is 100% Open Source and available under the permissive Apache 2.0 License. At first sight it seems like a perfect companion for Vue and React developers needing comprehensive content management capabilities. GraphQL is currently an optional technology, where a classic REST API is provided as well.

Many of the CaaS solutions like Contentful, Prismic.io, GraphCMS and Cosmic.js tend to be quite basic. This in comparison to monoliths that have evolved over the years to be the swiss army knives customers expect from a CMS. This opens up an enterprise grade headless CMS for JavaScript,

Notable features of Gentics Mesh are document level permissions, content versioning capabilities, built in support for clustering as well as APIs for tagging and imaging - including Focal Point Handling for Responsive Images. The tool is written in Java and uses the Distributed Multi-Model Database OrientDB as a storage engine.

Gentics Mesh is in under development and is currently in Beta phase. Developers can access the full source on the project's GitHub repository: https://github.com/gentics/mesh