Introducing Nuxeo Platform LTS 2016

After a year of Fast Track releases, we released the Nuxeo Platform LTS 2016, right on time to close this year with a bang! It was an exciting year for us, with an ever-growing engineering team, in Paris, New York, and Lisbon and one year of crazy commits. Statistics show more than 2500 commits every month on the main Nuxeo Server code repository with 5M+ lines of code, not counting all the addons, client SDKs, mobile applications, the Desktop Synchronization app, and other software that we create in side code repositories. The end result is the Nuxeo Platform LTS 2016 and its set of addons and client applications.

Confirming and Showcasing our Position Among the Most Performant, Reliable and Scalable Content Repositories of the Market

We’ve reached 1 billion assets with amazing performance on creating and fetching content. Behind those numbers, we have one year of intensive work on all elements of the platform:

• We thoroughly reviewed how information is fetched from the index or repository to the client-facing APIs to ensure there is no unnecessary waste of time.
• We optimized the APIs to ensure we could properly leverage MongoDB sharding capabilities.
• We implemented some tools around benchmark automation. You can browse benchmarks.nuxeo.com to view the quality reports of our in-house tools.

The number of assets managed is one example, but the platform goes far beyond storing information. For example, we’ve also improved our asynchronous work persistence stack to reduce its footprint in Redis and allow it to queue even more work, such as conversion work orders, thus improving the scalability of asynchronous processing management.

Continue Building Strength with our Platform Strategy

We’ve made the core server distribution lighter by removing the JSF/Seam dependencies (they are still available as a Nuxeo Package). We also added:

• Additional client SDKs (.NET, PHP and Python), and completely rewrote others (JavaScript and Java clients)
• Marklogic as an additional NoSQL backend
• Pluggable Event Pipes, for external queuing strategies (like Kafka or MQ Series)

• Many new REST API capabilities: More than 15 endpoints and content enrichers have been implemented this year to complete the list of existing ones: directories, content upload, notifications, search, collections, and locking information.
• A large set of web components for building content-oriented business applications (see https://elements.nuxeo.com). With these components you can very quickly build custom frontend applications with strong business browsing logic with unlimited access to free forms, tasks management, search, and more.

• Integrations with OneDrive, Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive

Strengthen our Lead in Enterprise Digital Asset Management Solutions

• A new assets browser and manager: Nuxeo Web UI, still in beta for the next couple of months, will provide a completely new browsing experience with great facilities for capturing, browsing, searching content, as well as managing business processes around them.

• We’ve added integrations and applications to the platform to provide end to end control of assets in order to improve intellectual property protection, avoid duplication of work and maintain information integrity. For example, a sales representative in contact with a provider/customer who would share assets can import those assets from the CRM (Salesforce) UI. Those assets will then be in the DAM repository and the system will have the ability to start an automated workflow and assign assets to designers for improvements/transformations before customer validation (using the mobile app, for instance) and then publish. In this chain, all actors see the same asset at any time and we control easily who can leverage it with unique ways to access it via the repository.

In this use case we leveraged three of our new integrations:

• Salesforce for ECM/DAM integration: It is now possible to let the customer-oriented enterprise workers fill the DAM repository from the CRM user interface, and edit content from there, using Nuxeo Direct Edit.
• Adobe Creative Cloud: Creative teams can easily work on the assets with a plugin that integrates the Nuxeo Digital Asset Platform inside the UI of Photoshop and InDesign, providing great comfort for assets selection.
• Native Android and iPhone Applications allow you to preview documents anywhere and anytime, accelerating long enterprise review cycles.

• New transformation and format support:
• 3D format support (3D previsualization with controls, scene extraction, metadata extraction)
• A new set of operations for video processing (cut, slice, watermark, caption extraction, merge)
• PDF assembly toolkit, including the ability to cut a PDF into several parts, merge PDFs, watermark them
• Faster access to heavy media resources: We’ve implemented a Proxy edge cache for multi-site organisations who want to have a cache deployed in their local network for quicker downloads. Nuxeo Edge Cache provides a fully secured solution that can be installed for each local network.

Learn more about Nuxeo Content Transformation Services here.

• Provide easy upload boxes to unauthenticated users who can use the content application by email invitation, without needing a permanent account.

Build a Platform and Tools that Developers and DevOps Love

Since the first versions of the Nuxeo Platform, technical design and available tools for project realization have been among our primary concerns. This year we released three game changers in that area:

• Branch Management in Studio. It is now possible to create branches of the configurations you make in Studio, the tool for implementing your business logic. For example, you can have a feature branch, as well as a master branch and a maintenance one. This will enable developers to work with a maintenance branch or to implement a feature without impacting the master branch.
• Code Generation: The Nuxeo Code Generator (“yo nuxeo”) allows you to bootstrap new projects, create Nuxeo Packages, add automation operations to your project and more.
• Nuxeo Dev Tool Extension: On Chrome and Firefox, you have access to features such as hot reload of your project, JSON export, and automation trace activation.

• As usual, it is available in many flavors for installation: simple zip, MSI, brew install, Docker, VMs, Cloud Formation, and Azure
• Improved nuxeoctl packages management

This was just a sneak peek! Download the LTS 2016 if you haven’t already and check out these features yourself.