I am pleased to announce the availablility of a Cumulative Feature Pack for Performance Improvements for CQ5.3. The Performance Pack is a Roll-up of 61 Performance related Hotfixes and Featurepacks, optimizing the CQ5 administration and usage on various aspects. The Knowledge Base contains an article listing all fixes (customer login required). Please verify if the individual features are related to your implementation before installing it. The Performance Pack is available on Day's Package Share.

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We have put together some slides on the Pack. In case you have a question please contact customengineering@day.com

Day's collection of screencasts is now available as HTML5 video, i.e. using the <video> tag instead of a Flash player (and Flash only as a fallback). The videos have been converted to mp4 and ogg. The semantics of the <video> tag allow for different renditions to be offered to the client which can then choose an appropriate one.

Check out the screencast Web Application Development with CRX or the CQ5 introduction. You will need a non-IE browser, like:

• Mozilla Firefox 3.6+ (ogg in HTML5 inline)
• Apple iPhone 3+ (mp4 low-res in HTML5 fullscreen)
• Apple iPad (mp4 in HTML5 inline & fullscreen)
• Apple Safari 4+ (mp4 in HTML5 inline & fullscreen)
• Google Chrome 5+ (mp4 in HTML5 inline)
• Google Android 2.1+ (mp4 low-res in device player)
• Opera 10.5+ (ogg in HTML5 inline)

(Microsoft IE 6+ uses the Flash fallback)

Thanks to Cédric Hüsler and Gabriel Walt (see them below testing on their pet devices) for making this possible ;-)

We released CRX 2.1 exactly a month ago. Now that the release dust has settled a bit, I have realized how much we have done in this release, and how many interesting features and technologies we have included, either completely new or largely enhanced. In essence, we've got many gems in CRX 2.1, and gems are sometimes not easy enough to find.

From my personal experience you can always learn interesting things about the product from the engineers who actually implemented, tested, or documented the stuff. Water cooler talk can help you understand a lot in an easy, relaxing manner.

All that has led me to an idea to have series of blog posts, CRX Gems. Day Software developers and engineers will be presenting their favorite features from CRX 2.1, explaining how to do things, or indeed uncovering hidden gems. The inaugural post about Repository URIs will be done by Day senior developer and Apache committer, Jukka Zitting.

Happy Reading!

I'm proud and excited to see Day CRX 2.1 generally available. This first standalone release of our enterprise content repository product implementing the new JCR 2 (JSR 283) standard, and enabled for the upcoming CMIS standard, is a milestone in Day Software content technology and product strategy. The first release of CRX 2 technology, CRX 2.0 engineering controlled release embedded in our CQ 5.3 product, has been shipping already since January 2010.

Download the free developer edition of CRX for all your evaluation, development, and testing needs. Watch the product screencast on www.day.com/crx. Follow the First Steps with CRX guide to web application development on CRX platform. You will discover the product features in the matter of minutes. 

Our enterprise customers and partners can download CRX from DayCare support platform. If you are interested in the enterprise license, contact our regional office. For smaller projects developed using the CRX developer edition, which need to go into production, you can order our competitively priced CRX ONE edition. Projects based on Apache Jackrabbit can also benefit from CRX enterprise or ONE edition's commercial offering & support thanks to drop-in compatibility with CRX.

This release is the result of industry cooperation in defining the JCR 2 and CMIS standars, open source community providing the reference implementation of JCR and other modules used in CRX, and our customers, partners, and developer edition users providing us with valuable feedback and challenging enhancements requests. I'd like to thank you for this great cooperation on behalf of Day's highly motivated and qualified delivery team, who have made every effort to ensure it is a great product release.

For more information, see Release Notes and product online documentation at docs.day.com, and knowledge base articles.

Also, do not miss the upcoming events related to CRX 2.1:

• Mark the date for the CRX 2.1 Launch Webinars on Thursday, May 6th, 2010: for Europe at 11 a.m. CEST and for US at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET.
• Participate in Day's IT Agility Cup development competition for developers of composite content applications, with categories including Innovative JCR Application, Innovative CMIS Application, and Innovative Mobile Application.

I'll be talking at Scala Days 2010 in Lausanne on April 15th about the Scala scripting engine for Sling. While my talk at Jazoon 09 was mainly about using Scala from Sling, this session will be more focused on internals of the Scala scripting engine.
    
Unfortunately the conference is sold out already. Watch my Scala for scripting page for the session slides and other upcoming support material.