Last week, I was at Paris for Nuxeo World 2011, the yearly meeting for all Nuxeo customers and developpers. Before that, I attended the Nuxeo Sprint for two days, developping on stuffs with the Nuxeo team. Here are some notes about both events

Nuxeo Sprint

There were two subjects i had to develop on for this two days. The first on was to share ideas about a basic WCM framework on top of Nuxeo. Two guys of PCSol showed us what they did for site they made and I presented what we call "Labs" a site factory for people who don't know what is the web.

For this part, we wanted to be able to compose webengine apps instead of using inheritance. Think of a module that know how to handle comments, another one ratings etc... The problem was that we had to drop the support of webobject because they're the cause of the inheritance limitation. 

We decided to externalize the templates resolution in an external service (made by Anahide) and Bogdan made a JAX-RS app that make use of this service. The main problem is that webengine already have a lot of cool feature, and "front-porting" them to the new model seems to be quite long. 

The second subject was about to integrate our work on rating into Nuxeo. I did this job with Laurent Doguin, and since our modules were plenty of tests, it took us merely one day to do it. The code is already available here : 

http://hg.nuxeo.org/sandbox/nuxeo-platform-rating/

There still should be some better JSF integration to be able to play with the jquery rating plugin. We use it extensively in our webengine apps, so it should be quite stable.

Nuxeo World DAY 1

As last year, the event took place at "Théâtre des variétés" in Paris. After a cup of coffee, I rejoin my Leroy Merlin team and attended the opening talk of Eric Barocca. To summarize, Nuxeo is gaining more and more customer in a wider and wider functionnal area : Leroy Merlin intranet was one of the three samples Eric choosed. When looking at the growth of Nuxeo Studio active projects, the Configuration as a Service seems to be very successful. Studio was used a lot during these two days to demonstrate the fact that creating a new document type, a new operation is a very easy task.

Next talk was Sword (Platinum sponsor) explaining their experience in document oriented application.

Then Benjamin Jalon, Nuxeo DM product manager, showed us the evolution of the leading application of Nuxeo. This was a real social oriented presentation ! It was the first someone other than me made a talk about the opensocial stuffs a Nuxeo. I really loved what they made with our container. This is for me a complete new way for adressing ECM. You now don't think on folders, hierarchy etc... but you think of Social Collaboration folder with simple security rules. There are some things that are public, and other which are only visible by the workspace members. This is powerfull, since you can expose some public stuffs to people outside of the workspace and let other be private.

Documents are visible via content widgets that you can drop on a fully customizable layout. 

There is also a new activity feature that records all users interactions with document. Mini-message use this features to give the user to "tweet" some messages the the workspace's members. 

After that, I choosed to hear Stefane Fermigier and Oliver Grisel talk about semantic stuffs. After a brief introduction to semantic web by Stefane, Olivier made a demo of the semantic integration in Nuxeo. Imagine that when you upload some documents in Nuxeo, they're analyzed to extract entities from the corpus : person, organization, countries. Compared to last year's demo, the integration is better done in nuxeo DM, it can use french corpus and there is a connector to the Temis semantic engine. There is also a cache on DBPedia database that make the searches a lot faster. 

One other thing is that after extracting entities, the engine can suggest you some topics on the document. Imagine you have extracted the French country and that a lot of economic organization are extracted two, it can suggest that the document is about french economy. 

After the lunch, there was the Nuxeo roadmap talk by Thierry Delprat. A I didn't took any note, I can't enumerate all the stuffs but the global feeling is that there will be a lot of infrastructure enhancements : 

•  Nuxeo for the cloud
•  Apricot integration to make it possible to run Nuxeo on pure OSGi. 
•  Various libs for the mobile platforms (Android and iOS)

For the functionnal features, you'll see the fusion of Nuxeo-DM and DAM and  version alignement. At deploy time, you choose what feature to activate. CMF will also be integrated in Nuxeo DM.

Next, I attended a talk about mobile usage of content apps. They made a small demo of what can be done with an Android tablet. The main thing is that Nuxeo will provide a library that will take care of the communication with the nuxeo server even if the network is done. In offline mode you're still able to create documents : they will be taken back to the server when the network goes back. I'm really waiting for the same lib for iOS. 

Nuxeo World DAY 2

For this morning, I had to prepare some slide for my pres so I unforutnately couldn't attend the first keynote. I hope there will be a cool video since it seems to be a cool talk from Whashington Consulting's Laurence Hart.

Next was a tech talk by Thomas Roger on the opensocial integration. There are plenty of stuff that make it easier to play with gadgets in Nuxeo. I then showed some of the usage we have of the opensocial container at Leroy Merlin. 

After the lunch break, I came to see a talk on Nuxeo DAM. First of all, it will be merged back into Nuxeo DM to give a "Media Sharing" tab in the main interface. Then the video extraction has well evolved : 

• Use of HTML5 video player with fallback on flash
• Storyboard extraction in video

Despite it can't be used as a Youtube backend for performance reasons, it allows one to store their video in a way it can be viewed in a web browser. The performance issues regarding streaming will perhaps be adressed during this year.

After that I came to see a use case on media publishing with the integration of a Flex app + Nuxeo + Quark XPress server. This was a really cool demo with live preview of documents and a very fluent interface thanks to Flex. 

Then I came back to the main room to see Bogdan demo of the Nuxeo IDE. You can think of Nuxeo IDE as the prolongation of Nuxeo Studio into your IDE. There is a real integration of your Nuxeo Studio project into Eclipse so that you can deal with your own Java developpement. It also support hot reload for your project just by pushing a simple button. 

That's all for me, I had to leave to take my train and come back to Lille. I had a really pleasant time during this four days with really kind and bright people. I come back to my work with a lot of ideas and perhaps future project leveraging the Nuxeo platform !