Reflection on AEM 5.6 release and preview of mid-year Release by Cedric Huesler

Cedric Huesler (the product manager of AEM/CQ) will give a talk at the OC CQ User Group meeting (May-22, 6pm at the offices of Capital Group)

http://www.meetup.com/OC-CQ-Sling-JCR-User-Group/events/112309702/

Would be great if you can make it!

Webinar: Increase Online Sales with Persuasive Content through Magnolia CMS’ Shop Module

I will be moderating a Magnolia CMS webinar for the Open Source Magnolia Shop Module developed by fastforward and maintained by fastforward and magnolia. You can see a fully JCR based shop solution in action – join us for this great event!

Thursday, April 25, 2013
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM CET (11:00 to Noon, EDT)

register here >

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Creating unique online storefronts that are secure, integrated with back-office inventory and catalog management and also easy for customers to use, is a challenge for any e-commerce integrator. The Magnolia CMS Shop module is a toolkit that adds e-commerce functionality to Magnolia CMS and makes it possible to enhance shop pages with compelling content that attracts new customers and increases sales.

Some of the key benefits of this integration include:

• Products, product categories, prices and currencies are managed in Magnolia CMS’ AdminCentral.
• All data is stored in the Data module except shopping carts in their own workspace.
• Developers can get started quickly by using the default website structure containing shop, product detail and shopping cart pages.

On 25 April 2013, Ulrich Scheidegger, co-founder and managing director of fastforward websolutions and one of the developers of the Magnolia CMS Shop module, will present a webinar on creating Magnolia CMS-powered e-commerce websites without needing to add or run other shop software. This webinar will demonstrate how to build unique, branded online storefronts that are tightly integrated with Magnolia CMS’ intuitive editing and administration tools.

The webinar will be moderated by Ruben Reusser, CTO at headwire and expert in KonaKart e-commerce integrations. This webinar is extremely useful for Java and CMS developers of all levels, as well as IT professionals and system integrators interested in e-commerce solutions.

Device Detection Problems in AEM5.6 on Windows 8

When exploring AEMs default website geometrixx or geometrixx-media with a Windows8 device that has a touch screen (some of the newer laptops on the market for example)  you are either forwarded to a .tablet.html page (geometrixx) or the mobile site (geometrixx-outdoors). This seems to be a problem with the device detection that is part of AEM5.6. A tool called BrowserMap is used to perform a client slide test to determine your type of device and then you are redirected based on your device and a set of settings on the site.

The documentation from Adobe on how to set up your site for device detection can be found here

To see what AEM thinks your device is, you can go to http://localhost:4502/etc/mobile/browsermap/detect.html - with a Windows 8 Laptop with touch screen and Chrome you will get something like this as the output:

As you can see, the detection thinks the browser is running on a tablet.

Looking at the /content/geometrixx/jcr:content/cq:siteVariant node and the /content/geometrixx_mobile/jcr:content/cq:siteVariant node they both have a cq:variantFamily property with the value ‘geometrixx’. For the main website the media property is set to ‘browser, oldBrowser, highResolutionDisplay’, for the _mobile site to ‘smartphone, tablet, highResolutionDisplay’ – for whatever reason, this is not a String Array property but just a comma separated list and the node type is nt:unstructured – cq:siteVariant is the actual name that the browser detection is looking for.

What’s interesting to me is that on geometrixx, a selector called tablet is added and the browser stays on the same page while the setup in geometrixx-outdoors seems to be the same but there the browser is redirected to the mobile version of the site.

You can force AEM to use a specific device and bypass the BrowserMap detection by adding the parameter device=[device group name] to the URL. The supported device groups by default are:

• smartphone
• tablet
• highResolutionDisplay
• browser
• oldBrowser (the latest version of Firefox is considered an oldBrowser)

The BrowserMap library is available on github at https://github.com/raducotescu/browsermap. The testpage that’s available within AEM is also available online at http://raducotescu.github.com/browsermap/index.html – the library in AEM seems to be a bit more up to date since it can detect IE10 on Windows 8 (although it thinks that it does not have touch capabilities) – the one on github just reports it does not know the browser.

On the bright side, geometrixx-media does not need the browser detection since it’s a responsive design based website. I highly recommend going that route.

Adobe CQ (AEM) Debug Filter

As outlined in the security doc for AEM, you should turn off the debug filter on your production instances. When searching the docs, however, I had a hard time actually finding the options for the debug filter.

There is a class called DebugFlag that enumerates all the options for this filter:

http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/current/javadoc/com/day/cq/wcm/api/DebugFlag.html

the 3 values supported are layout, mdev and mdevc – layout outputs information about every cq:include on the page (path, selector, resource, component), mdev and mdevc output what mobile device AEM thinks the browser is. If you add debug=mdev to the page, the output is right there on the screen, if you use mdevc, the output is a html comment.

AEM 5.6 and Timewarp

Adobe CQ (AEM) comes with this handy feature called timewarp – in a nutshell, it allows you to see the page in different versions by adding a timewarp cookie or timewarp parameter to your page. Just go to the sidekick and go to the version tab. Expand the timewarp tab. select a date and time and click go (or timewarp to see a modal with a history of the edits.

If you want to access an older version of the page directly, add ?timewarp=(long) as a time to your URL and you should see the older version.

Starting with 5.6, you may want to exit the timewarp before you do anything else. Going back to the new touch UI projects screen while in the timewarp mode throws an exception (the timewarp is by default set as a cookie and filters the repository accordingly, so this may start to fail).

I’d say Adobe has some work to do here – somewhere along the lines of ‘let’s do the timewarp again’

AEM (Adobe CQ) Performance on different Hardware

The other day we ran into a bit of a problem because of storage speed in one of the environments we were setting up CQ5.5 in. It was a VMWare environment with 10GB of ram, 8 CPUs and lots of storage configured for it – however, the storage was configured over NFS. The performance of the storage was very poor until the team mounted the NFS storage on the host operating system and configured a vmdk file as storage for the VM. Now CQ is running fast and smooth.

CQ has a handy tool in the Felix Console to measure disk speed. If I run it on my own computer I get the following output (you can find it at http://localhost:4502/system/console/diskbenchmark , click start, wait for a couple of minutes and then hit stop):

Operation Type	Operations Per Second for Block Sizes
	256 B	512 B	1 KB	2 KB	4 KB	8 KB	16 KB
write	297	569	1105	2858	16175	15915	14990
read	290468	285605	276539	265199	245365	194254	125938
write	16654	16955	16485	16294	16280	15868	15232
read	289515	285575	274960	260759	246216	192033	126604
write	16687	16481	16507	16076	16243	15812	15494
read	288390	282803	273778	263346	241982	192439	123351
write	16609	16585	16484	16630	16418	15811	15149
read	287073	282856	272822	263683	242169	192894	126518
write	16477	16370	16294	16412	16225	16034	15048

Note: Java7, CQ5.5, Sony Vaio with Intel i7-3682CM @2.2GHz, Win8 wirth a hard disk performance index of 5.9

I ran the same test in AEM5.6, the numbers are about the same. The disk speed test does not test true repository speed but the actual speed of reading and writing files from java to the directory that is specified.

Well, I shared my numbers – please share yours (I’ll post more as well soon) – Would be great to get a nice long list of different servers, developer boxes, os’s, etc compiled here.

Some more numbers

MacBook Air 1.7GHz Intel Core i5, 60GB Solid State Disk

Operation Type	Operations Per Second for Block Sizes
	256 B	512 B	1 KB	2 KB	4 KB	8 KB	16 KB
write	5097	6752	10098	13113	14913	14868	14419
read	522298	498729	479957	444013	386557	283406	175218
write	15102	15159	14810	14671	15023	14763	14234
read	519715	496583	480427	443306	383299	281750	176323
write	13236	14569	14770	15120	14971	14816	14390
read	524098	498535	484440	442899	389182	284113	175112
write	15251	14893	14755	14784	15086	14784	14429
read	528208	502405	484314	442884	387000	284755	174811

David and Cedric’s Top 10 Adobe AEM Features from Summit 2013

If you have not seen the recurring ‘Experience Manager Top 10′ talk (well used to be CQ Top 10) from the Adobe Summit or if you want to watch it again you can do so by following this link to Adobe TV

http://tv.adobe.com/embed/1181/16516/

Traditionally, the top 10 were presented by David Nuescheler, this year he is passing on the torch only doing an introduction and presenting the first item and then Cedric Huesler, the Senior Product Manager of the tool is taking over.

Here’s the list of the top 10 items:

1. Touch (all new user interface)
2. Launches
3. Creative Cloud
4. Responsive Design
5. Communities
6. Commerce
7. Articles & DPS
8. EMail Publishing
9. Target Everyting
10. Landing Pages

Have you explored any of these features? If yes, why don’t you leave a comment here and let everybody know what your experience has been?