Nuxeo EP 5.2.M3 has been tagged last week and released today.
This release is a milestone towards Nuxeo 5.2 which is still in active development, and due to be released in December.
As such, you should consider it as experimental or unstable, and still use Nuxeo 5.1.6, available from http://www.nuxeo.org/sections/downloads/, for production, unless you have very specific needs and are willing to go though you own QA process or to work with us on making really sure that it fits your needs.
Note that these packages are much bigger than the previous release (~150 Mb vs. ~110 Mb) due to the fact that they now include Nuxeo Shell (a command-line utility that can be very helpful to help manage a Nuxeo instance) and some of the JARs have been duplicated. This will be fixed in the next release.
Nuxeo WebEngine 1.0.RC has also been released at the same time (read below for more information), and packaged into the Nuxeo EP packages above.
Nuxeo WebEngine is also available as standalone, much smaller, packages, embedded in different application servers:
The first difference you will see in this M3 is the new back default theme that is a preview of the “Chicago” theme.
For this release, most of the work has be focussed on infrastructure so there are few really new features, but a lot will be available as soon as the M3 addons will be released.
Here is a quick overview of what has changed:
Seam / JSF WebApp
The infrastructure has been upgraded and cleaned up.
The default JSF WebApp is now based on:
Seam 2.0
JBoss RichFaces
For backward compatibility we have kept minimal support for Apache Tomahawk.
The WebApp code and in particular the Seam components have been optimized (40% faster than 5.1.7 and 100% faster than 5.2.M2) and cleaned up.
About context management, we still have not reached our target model, but there are already some new patterns in this M3.
WebEngine
WebEngine “JAX-RS” version has been released and is now included in Nuxeo EP bundle.
WebEngine has been completely redesigned. It is now based on JAX-RS and provides a powerful framework to build any RESTful application - and not just web applications as before.
Here is a list of the main new concepts and capabilities of WebEngine:
Configuration is minimal. Request dispatching, path matching, object behaviors and capabilities now are all defined using annotations.
Flexible object model: you can expose any Java object or resource as Web Objects which are described by Web Object Types.
Web Object Types are inheritable so you can easily extend existing objects.
Web Object Types are providing facets to add behavioral information on Web Objects
Any Web Object can be adapted: to dynamically add new functionalities to existing WebObjects you can define WebAdapter objects
Nuxeo Core Document Types are transparently exposed as Web Object Types - and facets are exposed as Web Object facets.
Provides built-in Document oriented Web Objects that may expose any Core Document.
Hot deploy improved.
Scripting is now focused on Groovy. Although other script engines are supported (but with some limitations) you must use Groovy to be able to extend the object model.
WebEngine now ships only with Groovy, other script engines must be installed by hand.
Groovy Scripting improved. WebObject or JAX-RS resources can be defined in Groovy.
Hot redeploy works also for Groovy classes when in debug mode.
Resteasy is now included as the default JAX-RS backend. More backends (Restlet, Jersey…) will come soon.
Provides a flexible way to build REST APIs for Nuxeo services.
Soon a generic command-line REST client will be provided as an administration and debug tool.
Wiki
WebEngine now comes with new Wiki / Wiki Page content types.
Wiki pages are editable in WebEngine and in the JSF WebApp.
Packaging and Application Server Support
Jboss 4.2.3 support for Nuxeo EP full.
Packaging with WebEngine and a minimal Nuxeo Service set are also available for:
Jetty
GlassFish 3 prelude
GlassFish support will be extended to the full Nuxeo EP in the next week.
WebEngine and JSF
WebEngine and the JSF WebApp now share some common components (Authentication, Filters…).
A very basic integration of the JSF WebApp as a backoffice for a WebEngine application is now available.
Integration and links between the JSF WebApp and WebEngine will be extended in the next weeks, but the basic integration layer is working.
Core
Nuxeo Core implementation has been improved in particular for the event handling system.
The full-SQL based repository implementation is now part of the standard bundle even if the default configuration still uses Jackrabbit. This repository implementation allows you transparent access to your data at the SQL level.
Indexing
The SearchService implementation directly inside the Jackrabbit or SQL Core have been greatly improved, but complete fulltext search is still not complete in current implementations. That’s why the m3 still comes with the Compass/Lucene based SearchEngine.
Nevertheless, m3 comes with the same version of the SearchService than 5.1.7: indexing is now completely stable and far more efficient.
Flex connector
A Flex connector is available as an addon for 5.2-M3.
Sample code will be released asap since it is ready.
GWT
GWT has been integrated with Nuxeo.
Sample code and the first addons based on GWT will be released soon.
We have just created a developer survey, that will enable you to help us improve the Nuxeo Platform by providing feedback on how you are using (or planning to use) the platform, what your impressions are on various aspects of the platform and its underlying technology, its documentation, etc.
It takes about 10 minutes to fill, but this will provide, we believe, really useful information and help us make more informed decisions about the future of the platform. So thanks in advance for your time.
If you plan to answer the survey, please do so before the 27th of November, as the data collected will be discussed during the Nuxeo Developer Day on December 1st.
To build your own maven-based projects against this new release, just update your POMs to 1.4.3 (for nuxeo-common, nuxeo-runtime and nuxeo-core) and 5.1.6 (for nuxeo-platform and nuxeo-theme).
Many thanks to all the contributors (coders, testers, translators, etc.) for their work on this stable release.
Work continues on the development branch, Nuxeo EP 5.2.
WebEngine relies on the Nuxeo content infrastructure (OSGi runtime, component architecture, document repository, ECM services, etc.) to provide a component-based programing model and a web development model for building componentized content-centric applications (such as wikis, blogs, content-oriented websites, etc.).
WebEngine relies heavily on the REST paradigm: URLs are mapped to the hierarchical content repository, content is accessed using GETs, user actions are GETs and POSTs, etc. Hence it’s very easy and straightforward to write RESTful apps using WebEngine.
WebEngine is fully extensible and componentized, thanks to OSGi (all components are OSGi bundles) and Nuxeo Runtime’s extension points.
WebEngine can run either standalone (with startup time <4s) using the Nuxeo Runtime launcher and the embedded Jetty 6, or in a full-blown Java EE app server such as JBoss. WebEngine can also be connected to any Nuxeo EP instance (and Nuxeo Core repository) and be used to expose / publish its content to the web.
Theses packages all include the fully functional Nuxeo EP platform, including:
the Nuxeo Runtime, which provides the foundation of the Nuxeo components and services based architecture (based on OSGi)
the Nuxeo Core, which provides APIs to core services such as document storage, security, import/export, etc.
the Nuxeo Service Platform, which provides APIs to higher lever services such as search, relations, directories, workflow, publishing, audit, image management, syndication, comments, forum, etc.
the Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (EP), which is a web application built on top of the Service Platform, and includes Nuxeo Theme, a powerful WYSIWYG theming engine developed by Jean-Marc Orliaguet.
the JBoss application server and all necessary third-party libraries.
What’s not included and how do I get it?
Some packages are considered as add-ons, either because they are still a little too “fresh” for general availability, or because they implement functionalities that we believe won’t be useful to the majority of users.
These currently include the WebDAV server, advanced transformers for MS-Office documents, specific login modules for various authentication systems (NTLM, CAS2, mod_sso…), etc.
You will find them on this page:
http://download.nuxeo.org/addons/jsp/listing.jsp
What’s new in this release?
Here are some highlights since the 5.1.3 release:
Server-side changes to support the new version of our MS-Office plugin, Nuxeo LiveEdit 2 (for more info, check this section of the Nuxeo Book and download the plugin from this page).
Refactoring of web services to use the JAXWS stack.
Lots of performance optimisations.
New or updated translations: Vietnamese (thanks to Le Tuan Dat and Daniel Tellez), Spanish (thanks to Daniel Tellez), Italian (thanks to Mirto Silvio Busico), Japanese (thanks to Damien Dupraz).
Lots of small improvements and bug fixes.
Make Nuxeo compile and run under Java 6.
For more details about what’s been added or fixed since recent releases, please check:
If you need more help, or if you’d like to comment or contribute, please join the mailing list or the forum.
Who should I thank?
This release is brought to you by the Nuxeo development team, which includes around 20 Nuxeo employees as well as several external contributors.
Of invaluable help also are all the customers and more generally users of the Nuxeo platform, specially those who took the time to provide feedback via the mailing list, the forum or he Jira.
What’s coming up next?
We’re already busy working on both Nuxeo 5.1.5 (stable branch) and Nuxeo 5.2 (development branch).
Expect new stable releases (5.1.x) about once per month. New add-ons will also be created and released in parallel to the stable releases.
A Nuxeo 5.2 development release is planned later this spring.
Minor, but anyway noteworthy improvements include:
Nuxeo EP now works on a Java 6 JVM, which can lead to significant performance improvements (up to 100% for certain workloads, according to some internal benchmarks).
Full text indexing has been improved and made faster.
Some tweaks have been done to enable communication with the new (soon to be released and announced) “LiveEdit” plugin for Internet Explorer, Firefox and MS-Word.
The Nuxeo EP 5.1.3 release is coming along nicely after a small delay due to the holiday break, and will be tagged in a couple of days.
The roadmap for the project in 2008 has been updated accordingly.
Feel free to discuss it in the mailing list or the forum if you have questions, suggestions or to supply missing information.
As can be seen, Nuxeo 5.1.3 will not be just a maintenance release, as we’ve been able to add new features by creating new plugins (ex: WebDAV, Portlets, SSO, etc.) thanks to a now quite stable infrastructure and API.
Nuxeo 5.1.3 will also be based on Nuxeo Runtime and Core 1.4, which feature some improvements while staying compatible with the previous version (1.3). The switch to Nuxeo Core 1.4 was done in December and has proved very stable.
After the 5.1.3 release, we’re going to focus on the 5.2 (trunk) work, so as to move to Seam 2 for the web platform. Most new features will still be developed as new components, and will either be delivered with the next maintenance release (Nuxeo 5.1.4) or with Nuxeo 5.2, or both, depending on technical feasibility and customers needs or community contributions.
You need to install OpenOffice.org separately (by following these instructions) if you want to get the benefits of MS-Office or ODF documents indexing and transformation to PDF.
This maintenance release features performance improvements, bug fixes, and some new functionalities including bulk document importing (see below).
A New and Noteworthy document (PDF, 20 pages) has been written to showcase the major improvements since Nuxeo 5.0, which was released in March.
You need to install OpenOffice.org separately (by following these instructions) if you want to get the benefits of MS-Office or ODF documents indexing and transformation to PDF.
A New and Noteworthy document (PDF, 20 pages) has been written to showcase the major improvements since Nuxeo 5.0, which was released in March.
Improvement
[NXP-643] - Make installer user-friendly and usable without web instructions
[NXP-1147] - Expose directories through a session bean to be accessible from remote
[NXP-1415] - Italian translation updated to svn rev 23412
Bug Fixes
[NXP-749] - exception when deleting a document in Search results
[NXP-1371] - Error when using remote api to search documents and size of the result set of documents is less than page size
[NXP-1378] - [Publication] When a document has been rejected from a section, the box corresponding to the section is still checked in the Publication tab of the document in the WS
[NXP-1382] - Text displayed to non reviewers is inaccurate
[NXP-1386] - can create a relation from a document towards the same document
[NXP-1388] - [Publication] Reject button publishes the document
[NXP-1393] - "2" displayed in Workflow tab between frames
[NXP-1395] - Notification in an approbation workflow : no notification sent when the document goes back to the initiator after modification of the document
The talks were in French, and so are the videos. For our non french-speaking community members, we’ll work on some new english-speaking content over the summer (screencasts and/or interviews).
About Nuxeo 5
Nuxeo 5 is an open source ECM platform, designed for extensibility and to make it easy to develop application in the fields of document management, collaboration and workflow.
Source code for the project is 100% public, available at svn.nuxeo.org under the LGPL and/or EPL licenses. The main community site is www.nuxeo.org. There is a main mailing list, currently hosting both users and developers conversations: lists.nuxeo.com/mailman/listinfo/ECM.
About Nuxeo Weekly News
Nuxeo Weekly News (or NWN in short), is published weekly by Nuxeo and dispatched to the Nuxeo mailing list and on the www.nuxeo.org website. It features news of interest to the Nuxeo users and developers community.
Besides all the bugfixes and technical improvements, the major new functionalities since the M3 milestone are:
Multi-servers deployment
REST API
XML-based Import / Export for documents and repositories
New URL system
You need to install OpenOffice.org separately (by following these instructions) if you want to get the benefits of MS-Office or ODF documents indexing and transformation to PDF.
[NXP-679] - Use Seam Exception mechanism instead of nuxeo's custom interceptor
[NXP-753] - Nice id generation for documents so that path and DM.name is clean
[NXP-845] - Creation of a new user : no button but a link
[NXP-853] - The button "delete"is still displayed and active for a checkout document, (but if the delete action does'nt work :-))
[NXP-879] - at startup, or after a logout, the display of the login page throws an exception which is caught as ERROR by the Logger, where as it is the normal behaviour
[NXP-892] - ergonomy : In the right management screen, add new security rule part, there should be an alert if we click on "add permission" without any user selected
[NXP-932] - When some documents are selected in a page of the pager, and then we do the opertation (ie mass edit), they stay selected even if the page is not displayed
[NXP-972] - Make indexable events configurable against search service.
[NXP-1031] - There should have a link to switch to the editor
[NXP-873] - Relaoding the document/workspace using breadcrumbs link should redirect on the Summary/Content tab
[NXP-891] - In section part, when I move a sub sub section to a sub section level, the tree is not updated (not refreshed), even after I click on other sections.
[NXP-896] - Users shoudn't be able to delete documents locked by others
[NXP-945] - exception when uploading Excel document
[NXP-947] - Document change visible only after page 'full-refresh'
[NXP-978] - NuxeoLiveEdit has a problem with Excel files
[NXP-1015] - user services hyperlinks (dasshboard, vocabularies mgmt, members mgmt) not displayed just after login
[NXP-1042] - filter rules are not merged properly when deploying
“Veterans of the software industry have, hardcoded into their DNA, the assumption that in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform will always win.” Marc Andreessen.
The release was accompanied by a “New and Noteworthy” document (PDF, 280 kB) which highlights new technical features and functionalities in the release.
Nuxeo 5.1.RC soon to be released
A release candidate (RC) will be tagged this week. The focus of the development team is now bug fixing, with a target release date for the GA version in June.
If you’re willing to shake up the application and look for bugs before the RC is tagged, you can do so by downloading and testing the latest daily snapshot and reporting issues in the projects Jira bugtracker.
Presentation material from the Paris Seminar available
Our customer seminar in Paris on June 7 has been a huge success, with more than 70 attendees and very interesting presentations.
Note: three out of four slideshows are in French. If you can’t read French, you might want to only consider looking at Eric’s slides which give an high-level overview of the new Nuxeo 5.1 platform.
We’re also working on editing the videos that have been shot during the seminar and will be available soon.
About Nuxeo 5
Nuxeo 5 is an open source ECM platform, designed for extensibility and to make it easy to develop application in the fields of document management, collaboration and workflow.
Source code for the project is 100% public, available at svn.nuxeo.org under the LGPL and/or EPL licenses. The main community site is www.nuxeo.org. There is a main mailing list, currently hosting both users and developers conversations: lists.nuxeo.com/mailman/listinfo/ECM.
About Nuxeo Weekly News
Nuxeo Weekly News (or NWN in short), is published weekly by Nuxeo and dispatched to the Nuxeo mailing lists and on the www.nuxeo.org website. It features news of interest to the Nuxeo users and developers community.
Besides all the bugfixes and technical improvements, the major new functionalities are:
Multi-file support on a single document
A forum
Improvements on the directory management system
A better user management interface
Improvements of bulk modification
Document publishing through drag & drop
ATOM and RSS
Please read the “New and Noteworthy” document for details on these new features.
You need to install OpenOffice.org separately (by following these instructions) if you want to get the benefits of MS-Office or ODF documents indexing and transformation to PDF.
[NXP-946] - exception when creating a document of type ‘file’ and attaching a MS Word file
[NXP-949] - when publishing a document, if we select more than one section as target, the “real” selection is hazardous and the document is not published every where we wanted
[NXP-1057] - prevent the firefox D&D plugin to interpret online images D&D as file upload attempts
[NXP-1059] - Fix all broken bean that cannot passivate correctly
[NXP-1063] - after a while without clicking on the web app (5 minutes maybe) if we start by clicking on the jsf tree, anexception is thrown, and the only thing we can do is log off
[NXP-1065] - Error when I approved a document on a serial review
A new milestone will be tagged “really soon now” (probably tomorrow). This will be the last milestone before the RC and GA releases in June.
If you’re willing to shake up the application and look for bugs before the M3 is tagged, you can do so by downloading and testing the latest daily snapshot and reporting issues in the projects Jira bugtracker.
Upcoming events
We now have more than 50 registered guests for our free seminar on open source ECM in Paris on 7 June, next week. If you plan to attend and haven’t registered yet, please do it quickly, we will probably have to close registration soon.
We’ll be attending
If you are one of the 500 french software vendors who will attend the “2èmes Assises du logiciel” organized by Syntec informatique, come meet us at our booth.
Video interview of our CTO published by JBoss
JBoss, one of our most important partners, has just published a video interview of our CTO, Thierry Delprat, which was shot a few months ago during JBossWorld.
This video is available in the following formats: Quicktime (38Mb), Real (9Mb), Real Stream et Ogg Video (15Mb) or from YouTube, below:
We have uploaded pictures of the Nuxeo team, the Nuxeo office in Paris and events we’ve been organizing or attending to Flickr. Expect more to come.
About Nuxeo 5
Nuxeo 5 is an open source ECM platform, designed for extensibility and to make it easy to develop application in the fields of document management, collaboration and workflow.
Source code for the project is 100% public, available at svn.nuxeo.org under the LGPL and/or EPL licenses. The main community site is www.nuxeo.org. There is a main mailing list, currently hosting both users and developers conversations: lists.nuxeo.com/mailman/listinfo/ECM.
About Nuxeo Weekly News
Nuxeo Weekly News (or NWN in short), is published weekly by Nuxeo and dispatched to the Nuxeo mailing list and on the www.nuxeo.org website. It features news of interest to the Nuxeo users and developers community.
“This project is definitely one to watch and even get involved with.” Aaron Walker
Nuxeo 5.1.M2 released
Nuxeo 5.1.M2 (second development milestone towards Nuxeo 5.1 in June) was released last week, with many new features and enhancement. See the
Announcement on nuxeo.org for details.
Inspired by the famous “New and Noteworthy” documents that are published with each Eclipse release and milestone, we have written our own
New and Noteworthy for this milestone.
A lot of work was put into the slides, which are now online, and we hope you will enjoy reading them if you weren’t at the conference.
The slides are also browsable online from Slideshare or just below:
Aaron Walker was at the talk and has some nice comments in is blog (see also “Quote of the week” above).
Slides from the Nuxeo/JBoss event in London
We have also published the slides for the presentations we did in London during the Nuxeo/JBoss event in late April. Note that these were more business-oriented presentation, contrasting with the JavaOne presentation which was purely technical.
We’re hosting a free seminar in Paris on 7 June. If you plan to attend, please register quickly, we’re almost already running out of space.
If you are one of the 500 french software vendors who will attend the “2èmes Assises du logiciel” organized by Syntec informatique, come meet us at our booth.
The Nuxeo team has started working on a “Nuxeo Book”, which will be released with Nuxeo 5.1 in June.
The “draft” is already available online, but be warned that many parts are either not written, or not up to date with the current architecture, as they are being heavily worked on.
Nuxeo 5 is an open source ECM platform, designed for extensibility and to make it easy to develop application in the fields of document management, collaboration and workflow.
Source code for the project is 100% public, available at svn.nuxeo.org under the LGPL and/or EPL licenses. The main community site is www.nuxeo.org. There is a main mailing list, currently hosting both users and developers conversations: lists.nuxeo.com/mailman/listinfo/ECM.
About Nuxeo Weekly News
Nuxeo Weekly News (or NWN in short), is published weekly by Nuxeo and dispatched to the Nuxeo mailing list and on the www.nuxeo.org website. It features news of interest to the Nuxeo users and developers community.
Besides all the bugfixes and technical improvements, the major new functionalities are:
Document locking
Archive records management
User notifications and “send by email”
Custom versioning
Hierarchical directories
Clean URLs
Refactored search service that can use different search engines backends
RSS feeds
Paginated lists and better multi-selection handling
Improved management screens
Better comments service
Workspace creation wizard
Better rights management: ability to block rights inheritance
New workflows
One major technical change, that isn't visible in the packaged application, but is very important for our developers, contributors and system integrators, is the switch to Maven 2 to build the application.
Another one is the port (currently half-finished) of the platform to
Glassfish, the Sun open source Java EE 5 application server.
Please read the “New and Noteworthy” document for details on these new features.
We also have added an Italian translation, thanks to Mirto Silvio Busico.
The release has some known issues, including:
user management: when a user is created, one needs to click on User management link to refresh
publication: the document is not published on all the selected sections
You need to install OpenOffice.org separately (by following these instructions) if you want to get the benefits of PDF transformation.
What’s coming up next? Check out the roadmap for the next milestones.
If you’d like to help with some of the tasks, your input is very welcome (see the community section on this site to get started).
