Experience Delivers

Build brand, drive demand and extend your reach with web experience management

As the size of an Adobe CQ5 instance (now part of Adobe Experience Manager) increases, the performance of an application on top of the CRX repository can become a bigger topic to focus on. In my talk at CQCON 2013 I will present some of the inner workings of CQ5 with CRX as the underlying repository and explain how a good content design helps to keep a CQ5 application fast and responsive.

Another area for performance optimization of a CQ5 application often also include JCR queries. During my talk I will present some of the tools available in Adobe Experience Manager that help you troubleshoot queries and provide an overview of commonly used JCR query features with the performance you can expect from them.

I'm looking forward to CQCON 2013 in Basel and hope to meet many of the CQ5 developers out there.

I'm looking forward to my talk on automated self-testing and health check of live Adobe CQ instances (now part of Adobe Experience Manager) at CQCON 2013 in Basel. A number of Apache Sling and CQ5 developers have been working on various tools to check the health of a live CQ or Sling instance, and we seem to be converging on a set of simple tools that can be very helpful for system administrators and developers.

The focus of my talk is presenting the SLING-2822 prototype that I've been working on recently that allows for creating health check tests for Sling systems in an extensible way. Out of the box, you can configure rules to check MBean attribute values, OSGi bundles states, disabling of Sling default accounts or any rule that can be checked by executing a script in a language that Sling supports. Extension points allow for registering additional rule types as OSGi services.

This prototype is not a finished tool. The goal is to start a concrete discussion about what's actually needed in terms of health checks. This can be seen from various angles: checking that the CQ security checklist has been applied, checking that the system is still in good shape after upgrading some OSGi bundles, checking that performance counters are within acceptable limits, etc.

With this in mind, I hope that you will attend CQCON 2013 and join in the open discussion to provide feedback on which direction such tools should take. I'll make sure to mention the idea of using server-side JUnit scripts for auto-testing production instances, as reactions to that idea have been varying from sheer enthusiasm to cries of horror. Just slightly exaggerating; but it looks like opinions may vary on which tools to use where.

I'll also present related tools like Joerg Hoh's cq5-healthcheck tool and Davide Gianella's sanity check tool. We haven't yet decided if and how much we should merge all those ideas into a common tool, so getting feedback from you and the rest of the CQCON audience on that will be invaluable.

Since CQ 5.5 there are now 2 different ways of purging your versions.

- Configuring the Version Manager Impl component

"Light" version

- Using the Version Purge Tool

Complete algorithm, resource consuming.

Lately I've had a few developers come to me with the same question: how do you set the default components appearing in the Sidekick when first opening a page?

It's a legitimate question, switching to Edit mode for every page can be quite annoying, and we don't necessarily want to let the authors decide what components they are allowed to use in a particular Parsys.

However this is quite easy to fix, and here is how.

In a follow-up on Sneh Arora's article on integrating ffmpeg with CQ DAM for RedHat, this article describes how to configure an out of the box CQ5.5 installation with Digital Asset Management (DAM) to transcode source video to H.264 high quality video on Mac OS X, that can be displayed in Safari browsers and on iPhone/iPad/Apple TV devices.

I frequently encounter the question about Unit testing the Email notification & in support while debugging time is spent waiting for a mail to arrive. In CQ, Email notification happens during "Subscription to page events", "Subscription to forum events", "Perform a step in a workflow" Or "Any custom implementation".  Also based on envirnoment you might use "local Mail server", "free smtp server" etc... When you move on to next assignment the envirnoment differs. In this article I am sharing one of the mail utility developed and you might find this helpful.

Since re-launching the Experience Delivers blog on CQ 5.5, we have been busy authoring lots of posts - both non-technical and technical. In the developer track, I've noticed that there are a lot of instances where we are providing source code. We all know that posting source code in a blog entry can be a little tricky. It needs to be readable and more importantly ... copy & paste-able :)

Of course, I see this as an opportunity to learn more about CQ. I decided to create a custom component called the Syntax Highlighter.

Event handling can be done in a lot of different ways within CQ, that all have their cost, their impact, and their benefits.

5 ways of doing so are detailed here :
- At the JCR level with observation
- At the Sling level with event handlers and jobs
- At the CQ level with workflows & launchers
- Particular case of scheduled events
- Particular case of POST to the repository