Category Archives: Content Delivery

Using and debugging DXA (Java) with Web 8.5 on Amazon

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So I finally got around to having enough time to set up a Java-based DXA connecting to a Content Service in the Amazon cloud.

It was a fun adventure, to say the least, and most of it is due to my rustiness in Java. I have tried with both Eclipse and IntelliJ Idea, and definitely IntelliJ made it a lot simpler by detecting project dependencies and installing them for me – which actually made it harder to get Eclipse to work, as I hadn’t noticed what it had done.

Anyway – below are the steps I followed to get a local instance of DXA running within Eclipse. As with the .NET install, you need to make sure you have a proper firewall configuration allowing communication between your machine and the CIS, as well as having the right mappings set in Topology Manager (I used the default of “localhost:8080″ for this). I will not cover those steps in this post.

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SI4T-Solr 1.2 for Web 8

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Looking at code you wrote three years ago can sometimes be a confronting experience. In case of the code I wrote for SI4T, this was no different. After you go through the six stages of debugging and cringe at the aestestics of the code base, the only thing you can do is rewrite the stuff with the knowledge of today and be solaced by the fact that your code is actually used in production environments and not breaking too much.

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Web 8, SI4T and Storage Extensions

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The release of SDL Web 8 has seen the biggest overhaul of the Content Delivery stack since Tridion 2011 and much of it has been applauded much, as the new Micro Services architecture and with it the ability to scale, deploy and be distributed in general, gives many more architectural options than just having an API in your web application connecting you to a database.

Building this while guaranteeing backward compatibility with the Tridion 2011/2013 CD stack is more than a major task and I for one am happy to see that that feat was pulled off really well. That is, unless you have overridden the default DAOFactory classes in your Deployer Storage Extensions, as is the case with the SI4T Storage Extensions. When testing SI4T with Web 8, it turned out that loading of the SI4T Storage Extension did not work in every scenario. This has to do with the subtler points of Spring Bean Class loading.

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What, Why Can’t I Publish My Stuff?

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You’ve set up your content delivery environment and have your topologies all ready to go. Your publication has a Business Process Type, so you go to publish your first bit of content…

What? Where are my targets?

Huh? Where’s the target? You try a CME refresh, service restarts, even a server reboot with no luck.

This is a little gotcha that Dom Cronin pointed out at TDS 2016 and which I missed. As well as creating a business process type (BPT), that BPT also needs to be specified in a publication’s properties before you can publish items to it from that publication.

So, add your BPT to your publication’s properties

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and you will have your target available when publishing items from your publication. All is now good with the world.

yay

WebSphere 8.5.* Content Delivery Issues

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Recently I was involved in the setup of a new content-delivery environment, migrating from a WebSphere 7.* application server to WebSphere 8.5.5. Right away when we started up the application, we started seeing some content-delivery errors with our session preview web-service which we did not experience on WebSphere 7. I’m going to review the problem, and talk about how it was resolved. Continue reading →

Using a configuration file for your custom Tridion Content Delivery code

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Tridion (or SDL Web as it’s called nowadays) allows many extension points. You can extend the content editor GUI, you can extend events, and you can also extend a lot of things on the content delivery side, for example Ambient data claimprocessors, TCDL tag handlers, storage extensions, …

These content delivery extension points are usually written in Java.
This blog post will show you how you can easily add your own configuration files for your code.

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Running a .Net DD4T application on Linux

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DD4T .NET on Linux

 

At the Tridion Developer Summit in September Siawash Shibana and Albert Romkes gave a presentation of a DD4T .NET application running under vNext (The codename for the next .NET framework) on Linux.

Siawash and Albert made the application available publicy and although it currently uses mock SDL Web 8 provider objects plugging this into a real life content delivery service should be really simple when SDL Web 8 is released this month.

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