This week we introduced the latest Nuxeo Platform release. Fast Track 5.9.5 offers some new capabilities we know are important to many organizations today - cloud based content management development and document based storage via MongoDB.
Try nuxeo.io
First off, we are officially opening the doors to everyone for nuxeo.io, our Cloud Content Management system. If you haven’t yet heard about nuxeo.io, it’s our new Docker and CoreOS hosted service for creating and managing Nuxeo Platform clusters.
It’s the perfect platform as a service (PaaS) solution for companies that want to get their Nuxeo Platform development environments up and running quickly. It’s a great service for our customers who are building content-centric apps based on the Nuxeo Platform, and it allows developers to stop worrying about the plumbing and focus on building the actual applications.
It’s also a great service for SaaS providers. If you are building a Nuxeo-based SaaS application, nuxeo.io provides an environment to help manage services for your customers, while also managing your application infrastructure (nuxeo.io executes Docker images on a cluster, which is similar to managing application services and customers).
What do you get with nuxeo.io?
- Nuxeo Platform, with nuxeo.io services for managing and running clusters on the Cloud
- Nuxeo Studio, for easy customization of the Nuxeo Platform
- Nuxeo Marketplace, with ready-to-install add-ons and extensions
We’re very excited about the opportunities nuxeo.io provides our customers. For those who are curious about how nuxeo.io was built, check out this post from Damien Metzler.
New and Improved in Nuxeo Platform 5.9.5
There’s a list of improvements and updates in this fast track release, a little something for everyone we like to think.
For Users
Two updates for end-users of the Nuxeo Platform:
- Users can now reference a video inside a Note document type. The HTML5 player is used to play the video.
- We’ve added mime-types for Photoshop, improving detection and image processing of those kind of files.
For Administrators
Three improvements that should make administrators smile:
- You can now enable logging for slow queries. To trace all NXQL queries that take more than 100ms, activate the log for org.nuxeo.ecm.core.storage.sql at the INFO level and add in the nuxeo.conf: _org.nuxeo.vcs.query.log_min_duration_ms=100_
- Java version check at startup. The check on the Java version (greater or equal to 1.7) is done in nuxeoctl and nuxeoctl.bat scripts. If the correct version is not found, a comprehensive message is displayed: “Could not run configuration: Nuxeo requires Java {1.7} (detected 1.6.0_38)”.
- The Admin Center tab for Elasticsearch has been improved. A clear status is displayed that shows if there are indexing tasks running or pending. Administrators can also find information on the total number of documents in ES and a dynamically updated average rate of indexing.
For Developers
You know we love our developers and the updates for this release clearly show that.
First off, we now offer built-in integration with MongoDB, no need to run a Marketplace package. The work we did to make this integration happen serves as the base for implementing other NoSQL backend storage options down the road. We call this Document-Based-Storage and we’re excited to see where it goes in the future.
A couple of REST API improvements include:
Former Rest Providers have been renamed “Content Enricher“ for more clarity. We’ve added two content enrichers:
ACL: This adds ACLs of the document to the response. It was previously doable using the @ACL web adaptor. Having a Content Enricher for this allows you to use one call to retrieve the document and its ACLs.
Thumbnail: This one adds the url of the Thumbnail Picture to the response. You can use it when doing client side applications.
New Versioning Header. You can now control whether to create a minor or major version when creating or updating a document via the REST API, using the new “X-Versioning-Option” header, with “MAJOR” or “MINOR” as a value.
We’ve also made some improvements to our Elasticsearch integration that allow indexing more fields. Documents are now fetched directly from the Elasticsearch index instead of fetching the reference then loading the document from the database. This saves many database queries in the result set construction thus improving performance.
The new Business Days Management API allows you to compute a date given a delay and the list of holidays for the year. The delay will be added to the start date without counting weekends and those holidays. We see this new plugin useful in a variety of situations. Check out the details in the github repository.
A few final goodies:
- A new Video converter lets you add new video conversion formats without having to write custom java classes.
- A new plugin provides a RESTFUL implementation of the SCIM 1.1 interface, which allows admins to provision users and groups using a commonly accepted API. This API is used for instance by third party IDMs like Okta.
- Manage users and authentication with a new plugin that uses Okta IDP.
- Set up a two factors authentication for Nuxeo using this new plugin that uses Duo Web online services.
Nuxeo Studio Updates
Before finishing up, we should mention that a new version of Nuxeo Studio is also available. Included in this release are smarter editors for XML, NXQL (the native Nuxeo query language), CSS, and JavaScript, with syntax coloration, code auto-completion and code suggestion.
In addition, NXQL now includes a suggestion feature, making it faster and easier to compose queries, a common activity when customizing the platform.
That’s the great list of improvements and new features for the Nuxeo Platform. If you want to see what’s on tap for our next release, you can check out the roadmap. Otherwise, immediately available, Nuxeo Platform FT 5.9.5 can be downloaded today.