Day's CRX 2.1: Dual Standard Support, Agile Mobile Development

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Apr 28, 2010

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Don’t you just dream of coding away on an iPad from your couch, while taking advantage of JSR-283 and CMIS standards support (leveraging Apache Chemistry) and the ability to develop, package and share your composite content applications?

If that’s the case, Day Software’s (news, site) latest release of CRX (Content Repository eXtreme), Day's commercial JCR repository/application platform, was made for you.

Main Features of CRX 2.1

Last release of CRX saw the light of day in 2009, and today Day continues to build on top of that release with the goal to catalyze the community of developers who build composite content apps.

As you can see from the welcome screen,

the main activities in CRX 2.1 fall into three areas:

Develop
Package
Share

When Day’s CTO David Nuescheler gave us a tour of this release, it took about 29 seconds from the time he clicked the install button to get to this welcome screen in the CRX. The download contains a .jar file and a license. From there, you get to work in browser without having to do any heavy-weight lifting as you would in the Eclipse IDE.

CRX includes all the JCR-2.0 good stuff like editing on the content repository with version control. Once development is complete, you can package it up (note the filtering option):

Editing a package in CRX 2.1

As in the past, CRX 2.1 comes in several flavors, including enterprise and free.

Other New Features

Updated SharePoint 2007connector, with SharePoint 2010 upcoming
Compliance with JSR-283/JCR 2.0 and CMIS v1.0 (the latter is mere steps away from becoming an official OASIS standard)
Browser-based IDE called CRXDE lite that you may remember from the release of Day’s CQ 5.3. Therefore , you can use your iPad with its "relatively good keyboard," according to Nuescheler, to do minor development (see how Nuescheler does this from his couch)
Eclipse-based IDE called CRXDE (local install or in the cloud) can be attached to CRX
LDAP support

CRX CMIS Explorer

Sharing your complete package to the PackageShare is another step that you may want to take.

Use Cases for PackageShare

In the new PackageShare online service – which is cloud-hosted to help accelerate development (with support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3) – you can find anything from extensions to CQ5, product fixes to complete projects (i.e. entire websites with all code, configs and content) and additional features.

All packages go through a vetting process that includes testing and QA, upon which they’re available for download and install to the Day community members. Partners are also pitching in with out-of-the box components like specialized navigations or integrations for Social Collaboration with Flickr, Facebook, etc. Any third-party apps can be shared as well into the public sharing part of the service.