eXo Platform (Enterprise WebOS)

Today was a busy day, we have released two products. eXo JCR 1.8.2 is a maintenance release for our Java Content Repository implementation (JSR 170) while eXo PC 2.0 RC5 is one of the last release of our Portlet Container implementation before its final release along with the official launch of JSR 286 (Portlet API)

Here are the changes:

eXo PC 2.0 RC5

- cache control bug was fixed
- public cache problem was resolved
- url generation was fixed to work properly for AJAX calls
- major test portal / portal framework refactoring
- a number of internal improvements

eXo JCR1.8.2

- RegistryService.recreateEntry improvement to make the recreate in one Session. This change prevent the service from problems in multi-thread environment.
- In RegistryService an exception ItemNotFoundException was replaced with PathNotFoundException. Code tunning with .hasNode (may cause a little speed increasing:).
- Core will has a check for Same-name siblings in persistence layer, that will prevent problems with concurrent creation of same-name siblings nodes.

The eXo forum application, part of the new product eXo Knowledge Suite (KS), is very close to a beta state.

This application has many many features which is quite impressive for a first version. In fact we have been working on it for almost 10 months now. As for all the other applications, the persistent layer is based on eXo JCR which, once again, allow a single storage repository for all your contents.

Here are some screenshots:

• The Home Page with multiple categories and forums

•  Feature wise thread list

•  WYSIWYG forum editor

•  Web 2.0 Collaboration: Tags and votes

• Polls are also supported

And many many more…

We are getting closer to the final launch of our flagship products:

•  eXo Portal 2.0
• eXo Enterprise Content Management (ECM) 2.0

Both products will be the basis of the subscription versions we will launch in the incoming month. They are the result of dedicated packaging and an extensive QA applied on the community version that is available at OW2.

The product in its Release Candidate 2 state is favailable for test purposes to our partners and customers of the previous version that want to test it so do not hesitate to contact us to get the URLs to download them

Thanks again for your support!

We are proud to inform that eXo Portlet Container 2.0 RC4 has been just issued with some caching algorithm and compatibility improvements.

You can download it from the OW2 forge

eXo Portal 2.0 early success is also based on its great art work and web design.

To achieve such a quality, we employ 5 professional web designers that spend their time making greats skins for us and our customers.

This of course implies the use of  many images in the portal page. Unfortunately,  this may impact the page processing time if each image is served through a single HTTP request. Furthermore, it also increases the number of hits on the server which consumes CPU and lower the number of concurent users you can get.

Hopefully, there exist a method that allows to use several images within the page but to request them thanks to a single CSS request. This technic is called CSS sprite.

The idea is quite simple and leverages advanced CSS 2.0 features. We append into a single image several icons that will then be used in the css background code and relatively positioned using the following syntax:

.UICalendarPortlet .SearchIcon {
background: url(’icons/CalendarIcons.gif’) no-repeat left -1117px;
}

As you can see,  eXo Calendar application is using css sprites and we were able to dramatically reduce the number of HTTP calls when that application is first launched.

Here is the image: Sprite icons

The eXo development team is proud to release eXo Portlet Container (PC) 2.0 Release Candidate 3.

It is 100% compliant with the new Portlet API 2.0

You can download it from the OW2 forge

[Update] Note that we are waiting for the JCP to make public the specification and its TCK test suite. Once done we will release the final version that will be usable in production. This current release is only made for testing purposes to experiment the new spec

We have just released eXo JCR 1.8, the main changes include

• backup service with full and incremental modes
• improved replication for clustering use
• JCR WebDAV layer has been optimized for large files
• big JCR CIFS improvement with real NTLM (1,2) authentication, locks and notification support
• Owner inheritance support
• several major fixes for JCR core, import/export and versioning
• performance improvement especially for MySQL in heavy loading

You can download from our OW2 forge

Here are the release notes

We add a new entry in wiki. This is a step by step tutorial to create a webUI portlet. This portlet is a HelloWorld with a button which opens a popup. It uses basis of portlets and UI component.

You can found this entry in category Portal -> Practicals HOW-TOs -> Create a portlet, or here.

For the release of eXo Portal v2.0 - eXo Enterprise WebOS - that includes the latest technology of JSR-286, we will hold a 3 days public training session in Paris next month.

Dates : Week from february 25 to 29 (exact dates to be confirmed)
Content : eXo Portal 2.0, WebOS UI, JSR-286, Ajax portlets
Contact and registration : training@exoplatform.com
Limited number of places.

The code source repository of eXo Platform has moved from OW2 to its own tree located at the svn.exoplatform.org URL. Of course, we have just moved the source repository and binary downloads will always be available on OW2 forge. The move is done to improve performance for our remote teams in Ukraine and Vietnam.

To check out the code you just need a subversion client and the command:

svn co http://svn.exoplatform.org/svnroot/exoplatform/projects

For more information you can look at our documentation