Nuxeo EP & Nuxeo DM 5.3.1 available!

We are happy to announce a new release of our ECM platform, Nuxeo EP, and the collaborative document management application built with the platform, Nuxeo DM. The version number for the platform and for Nuxeo DM is the same, 5.3.1. It is available today and we encourage all our customers and partners to upgrade. We encourage all our customers and partners to upgrade.

Downloads are available on nuxeo.com download area and through the Nuxeo Connect portal for our customers.

This new release mainly brings improvements and bug fixes to the software. We have improved existing components and services, but very few new API have been added. This new version is fully backward compatible, hence upgrade is painless and requires no data migration or code change (see upgrade notes below).

Major improvements:

• The CMIS connector is now included by default.

• OpenSocial support has been improved and upgraded (with OpenSocial 0.9 and OAuth support); more compatibility testing.

• The default user interface is more configurable thanks to generalized usage of Layouts (and Nuxeo Studio).

• Our storage engine (VCS) has been improved and optimized for higher data volumes.

See below for a more detailed description of this release’s content.

Detailed release content

Security / UserManager

Computed group support

Default UserManager implementation now supports computed virtual groups.

Superuser configuration

The configuration to define the “administrator” global group (i.e.: role) has been extended.

You can now easily:

• define your own “administrators” group

• define several single Administrator users

JSF UI Framework

Layouts (forms/views)

The layout system is now used for:

• document listings

• summary screen

This makes the JSF UI more easily configurable.

As a side effect, Nuxeo Studio will now be able to let you customize document listing and summary screen content.

Widgets

More UI widgets have been packaged to be used in forms / views (ex: tags, comments, relations, user suggestion, etc.).

WebEngine

Jersey alignment

WebEngine is now based on Jersey version 1.1.5.

This provides better compliance with the JAX-RS standard and also allows deploying pure JAX-RS applications on top of Nuxeo.

Test framework

Thanks to the new test Framework included in Nuxeo Runtime (Junit 4 / Guice / WebDriver), you can now unit test Web Engine applications. See below for more details.

Storage / VCS

VCS is our document storage engine based on a relational database back-end.

Improved storage adapter for Oracle DB

Several small issues with VCS and hibernate have been solved to improve Oracle support. Improved performances thanks to some low-level optimizations.

Extended cluster support for VCS

VCS clustering is now available on all DB backends: H2, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, MS-SQL Server.

Query improvements

The NXQL query language has now support for:

• ordered folders

• ILike

• NOT BETWEEN (bug fix)

Default indexing configuration

The default indexing configuration now leverages the supports for multiple full-text indexes.

• one index for title

• one index for description

• one index for all text content

This makes the advanced search screen more powerful.

CMIS

Nuxeo has been working both on the specification effort on the CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Standard) standard, on a Java library under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation (project Chemistry), and on the implementation of CMIS on top of a Nuxeo content application.

You can find more information on CMIS support on this wiki page.

Chemistry

Chemistry and the nuxeo-chemistry module now provide a better support for CMIS 1.0 in Nuxeo:

• getDescendants and getFolderTree are now advertised, deleteTree works

• allowable actions are now provided

• regular support of Nuxeo documents that are in the trash (they are hidden from CMIS)

• content streams are readable and writable for all documents that support them

• CMISQL:

  • JOIN support has been improved

  • SELECT * now follows the spec

  • CONTAINS, IN_TREE and IN_FOLDER are now allowed

  • CMISQL can now easily be used from Java code in a Nuxeo application

• partial SOAP server support with UsernameToken authentication

• many bug fixes

CMIS support in Nuxeo DM

Nuxeo DM now comes with the CMIS connector by default.

OpenSocial / Dashboard

Shindig 1.1 and OpenSocial 0.9

Nuxeo OpenSocial integration is now based on Apache Shindig 1.1 that provides OpenSocial 0.9 standard support.

New gadgets in the Dashboard

The Nuxeo Dashboard now provides additionnal gadgets that can be used to customize your dashboard.

OAuth support

Nuxeo is now an OAuth consumer: this means you can have a gadgets that consume data from an external server supporting OAuth standard.

This has been successfully tested agains Atlassian Confluence 3 and Jira 4.

See [here] for more details.

Packaging

5.3.1 comes with new distributions profiles:

• Nuxeo DM (including CMIS) on JBoss 4.2.

• “Core CMIS Server” (a lightweight Tomcat packaging with Nuxeo Core and the CMIS connector).

• Nuxeo DM on Tomcat with transaction management and pooling support (aka JTA/JCA).

We have generalized the use of nuxeo-distribution-tools which combines Ant flexibility and simplicity with power of Maven artifacts management.

This simplified packaging system is based on Ant XML syntax and usable either as a Maven plugin, as an Ant task, or as a standalone command.

See here and here for more details.

Test framework

The Nuxeo Runtime now provides an enhanced testing framework that leverages Junit 4, Guice, WebDriver and customizable test annotations.

This makes building complex test cases easier since you can now inject features and configuration into the unit tests.

See here for more details.

Upgrade notes

Code migration

5.3.1 is fully backward compatible with 5.3 (no additional compatibility package is needed).

Packaging

If you use a custom nuxeo assembly to package your nuxeo distribution with your plugins, you will need to modify your existing assembly.

The new nuxeo-distribution system is simpler to configure and extend than the previous one.

See here and here for more details.

Data

There are no impacting changes on the storage structure.

If you want to leverage the new default indexing configuration (separated full-text index for title and description) you will have to update your reprository configuration (or use the one provided with 5.3.1) and build the new indexes.

Configuration

The opensocial.properties file format has been changed in 5.3.1, so you may need to use the one provided in 5.3.1 rather that trying to upgrade the one used in 5.3.

Dashboard

Dasboard initialized in 5.3.0 need to be migrated to 5.3.1.
You can use a simple nuxeo-shell script for that