The Nuxeo Platform 6.0 was released last week and we are proud to say that this LTS version has a lot of new and interesting features for developers!
TechCrunch recently published an article about “The Rise And Fall Of The Full Stack Developer”. The article explains the vast amount of technologies that are used to implement a scalable application that drives your company’s growth, or is at least a key component for it. It is no longer possible for one developer to be a full-stack developer and master all these technologies. The article indicates that you need a team of developers. Speaking along these lines, it is easy to summarize what we did this year in the LTS release: we took a huge step towards creating a full-stack platform! - one that saves you tons of engineering effort, while securing the end result and providing maintainable conditions for futures enhancements.
The new features that we added this year are:
- A NoSQL storage layer that is swappable with the previously existing relational engine. The first implementation is with Mongo DB. This is a storage option: it means that you won’t have to change your documents and business model when switching to this option. This storage option offers interesting characteristics in terms of scalability of concurrent writes.
- A powerful search engine, Elasticsearch, that provides an amazing scalability on queries. The way it has been integrated also makes it very easy to switch existing queries to use the Elasticsearch index. Elasticsearch brings a lot of capacities and features, especially for full text search, faceted search, distributed computation and data visualization. It is probably the most exciting technology in the content management space, and we’re putting it to work by deeply integrating it with the platform.
- An iOS SDK is now available beside the existing Android SDK. This SDK offers the ability to build mobile content applications in a few days with highly customized content display strategies and offline access to content. It provides facilities for wrapping the platform REST calls, offering access to more than a hundred API points that the Nuxeo Platform provides.
- A JavaScript SDK, with different flavors (node.js, query). We already have some success stories about it, for e.g.: World deployed applications in AngularJS.
- An upgraded standardized web framework. The main web application has been migrated to JSF2 and the latest stable release of Rich Faces.
- OAuth 2 and SAML support for authentication.
- A truly innovative and unique cloud infrastructure, Arken, that is used for hosting Nuxeo Platform applications. This is based on a Core OS cluster that manages Nuxeo Platform docker images. Thanks to the smart instance wake up/passivation policy and the exclusive use of micro-containers, this infrastructure gains several orders of magnitude in scalability and performance when you need to run many Nuxeo Platform instances. It also provides great resilience and ease in managing many Nuxeo Platform instances, directly from a single web application.
We also improved some of the previously existing features of the platform, including:
- The REST API now has new headers and new content enrichers, that allows us to optimize the number of calls required to run client side applications.
- The Desktop Sync Client, that now provides desktop integration between the web application and any software. It has been re-engineered to provide better extensibility.
- The Automation Framework (a unique approach in the ECM field on which we continue to invest). It now supports YAML format and improved multi-transactional loop management.
- The Form Framework. The layout service of this framework has new features, and we also added new widgets.
- The workflow, with some facilitators for the expression of escalation rules.
One might say that this a lot in one release, but there’s more! We have some AngularJS applications running, some customer specific iOS apps already in use, and some major customers already switching to Elasticsearch. How is this possible? That’s the magic of the LTS/Fast Track releases cycle! As soon as a big feature appears on a fast track, there is a high chance that a new customer decides to start on the fast track and benefit from the features. This gives us a great opportunity to adjust the model when necessary, and to make sure that important features are already heavily tested. The full-stack developer may have fallen, but the Full Stack Platform has just arrived!