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

Access to Adobe CQ Package Share without Adobe CQ

I meant to post this a while back. We did an install of Adobe CQ in an environment that’s pretty restrictive with internet access and thus we were not able to connect to the Adobe CQ Packageshare website from within CQ. After a bit of digging we found the following URL:

http://dev.day.com/packageshare/packages.html

after logging in you are able to download any of the packages on that site without accessing it through CQ.

Hope this will help others as well.

Adobe CQ Problem Clinic on November 7 2012

If you live in Orange County/Los Angeles or the San Diego area and work with Adobe CQ then bring your laptop, your project and your problems with Adobe CQ. We will have a session where you can present the problem you are having and we’ll discuss solutions for the problems and try to find a way to solve them to make your CQ implementations a success.

Adobe support personnel will be at the meetup to help us get through the issues.

We are meeting Wednesday November 7  from 6:30pm to 9pm at the Lake Forest/El Toro Public Library.

For more information about the meetup group and this event go to http://www.meetup.com/OC-CQ-Sling-JCR-User-Group/events/85466292/

Hope to see you there.

Using ticktick.sh to parse Json Responses from Adobe CQ5.5

ticktick.sh is a great little shell library that allows you to parse json responses from Adobe CQ. The following script is a simple example that pulls the current status of the installed, active and resolved bundles from the Felix System Console in Adobe CQ and presents the output. This can be used for example to check if the server is up and running. To use, download ticktick.sh, put it in the same folder as this script and run it.

The supported arguments are the credentials (admin:admin) and the url to the server root (http://localhost:4502).  You should see a nice pink status line with the information on how many bundles are active, resolved and installed as well as an error code of  zero if the server is up and a -1 if the server is still starting up.

curl -s -u $1 $2/system/console > /dev/null
if [ $? != 0 ]; then
	echo admin console on $2 not running
	exit -1
fi

. ./ticktick.sh

DATA=`curl -s -u $1 $2/system/console/bundles/.json`

tickParse "$DATA"

#echo ``status``
#echo current status total bundles: ``s[0]``, installed bundles: ``s[1]``, installed fragments ``s[2]``, bundles resolved ``s[3]``, bundles installed ``s[4]``

if [ ``s[4]`` = 0 ]; then

	echo ``status``: server fully up
	exit 0
else
	echo -e "33[2A33[35m"
	echo -n ``status``: server still activating bundles
	echo -e "33[K33[0m"
	exit -1
fi

Developing the style and templates/components in parallel for Adobe CQ5

In order to speed up development of a site within CQ5, it helps adopting the following process:

•  Devise templates and components for the site based on mockups
•  Implement a standard HTML for all templates and components
•  Develop the components necessary
•  Develop CSS/JS necessary to support the components

Using this approach, the front end team can develop the CSS/JS necessary for the site in parallel with the developers implementing the components and templates for CQ5. Instead of using a waterfall model where the front end team develops the basic HTML structure first and then provides the code to the CQ5 developers, this approach makes sure the CSS/JS works well within Adobe CQ.

To further minimize the risk of browser incompatibilities and to make sure the site will also look good on mobile devices from the start, it helps adopting a basic CSS/JS framework, commonly known as grid systems.

Some grid systems to consider are:

•  960gs (http://960.gs/)
•  Twitter bootstrap (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap)

The grid systems have a well known html structure and features such as reflow that help on smaller screens. Developing your components with a grid system in mind will also make sure the developed components can be reused in the future with a different stylesheet and make your CQ5 projects faster to implement and easier to adopt to a new site style and new features provided by the grid system.

The Adobe CQ5.5 version uses 960gs for the default geometrixx site, however, choosing twitter bootstrap will provide you with more out of the box functionality commonly found on today’s website.

update: we released a bootstrap templating integration for Adobe CQ 5.5 today. See the following link for more information

Adobe CQ5.5, first impressions

Adobe recently released a new version of it’s content management suite, now called CQ5.5 again – there was an effort to rebrand it last year to WEM but that seemed not to go over that well and was quite confusing.

The new version of CQ comes with a much better integration into the Adobe digital marketing suite (Omniture, Test & Target, Scene 7, etc) and there seems to be quite some work that has been done under the hood.

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CQ5.5 now comes as two distributions, a WAR file that can be deployed into any JEE servlet container as well as a standalone version that runs in the apache felix OSGi container – CQ used to be distributed as 2 war files with an embedded servlet container and to get to run it in any other container there was quite some work involved.

Unfortunately, the new release also has some downsides especially for system administrators. Lots has changed and it seems some of the features that were there before got lost. For example, you used to be able to just rename the jar file and drive the type of server (author instance or publish instance) as well as the port CQ would run on from the name (cq-publish-4503.jar would make it run on port 4503 as a public instance). Now, this feature only works if you start the jar file directly (java -jar cq-publish-4503.jar) but the installed service scripts, such as start and stop to control the server from an init.d script for example are now hardcoded to run an author on port 4502 (the default instance).

It seems the best way to install CQ5.5 at the moment is to do the following:

java -jar cq5-5.5.0.20120220-generic.jar -unpack

this will just unpack CQ into a subfolder crx-quickstart. Once that’s complete, start modifying the files in crx-quickstart/bin. You want to change the port, the run mode (type of instance you’re running) and the memory settings.

The following few lines will change the settings for you (replace $NEWPORT, $RUNMODE and $MAXMEM with your desired configuration settings:

NEWPORT=4503
RUNMODE=publish
MAXMEM=1600

sed -i.old "s/4502/$NEWPORT/" crx-quickstart/bin/*
sed -i.old "s/author/$RUNMODE/" crx-quickstart/bin/*
sed -i.old "s/-Xmx1024/-Xmx$MAXMEM/" crx-quickstart/bin/start*


Your basic start., stop and quickstart scripts should be modified, starting and stopping CQ can now be done by executing these commands on linux or mac

./crx-quickstart/bin/start
./crx-quickstart/bin/stop

on windows, you can just use

crx-quickstart\bin\start.bat
crx-quickstart\bin\stop.bat

Note of advice: make sure you use Java6 and not Java7, there are still some problems with CQ on Java7 it seems.

Also visit updated-init-script for cq5.5 for an init script that works with cq5.5