CQ 5.3: Features for sysadmins

Last week the new version of CQ 5.3 has been released.
I will give you a short review of the changes which has impact on an infrastructure and administration level.

Package Share: Day introduced the concept of a package share, where packages can be downloaded. It is designed for 3 different usecases:

  1. CQ product hotfix distribution
  2. You can create your own private part and place packages there (distribution within your projects, sharing with Daycare support, …)
  3. Make packages public available (example code and componentes)

I don’t recommend to use package share in your production system for the following 2 reasons:

  • It requires an outgoing connection to a Day server (I haven’t seen any dedicated proxy support for it, so you need to add -Dhttp.proxyhost=$HOST -Dhttp.proxyPort=$PORT … parameters to your JVM parameters, if you need to do proxying); your firewalling/DMZ concept may also not allow outgoing connections.
  • It allows you to easy bypass the concept of staged code deployments and testing, that means: Deploy hotfixes directly into production, which is not recommended.

So just use it on your development machines to fetch the hotfixes and share packages. No need to request them via a Daycare ticket anymore.

CQ 5.3 requires Java 1.5 for all parts. With CQ 5.2 it was still possible to operate CRX with Java 1.4; with the upgrade to CRX 2.0 this is no longer possible.
(If you start from scratch, just take Java 1.6; the Java 1.5 by Sun/Oracle reached its end-of-life …)

By default the serverctl configures CQ_MAX_OPEN_FILES to 8192 (yeah!); this is a reasonable value and should be sufficient for most of our customers.

Config section in Apache Felix Console (CQ 5.3)
Config section in Apache Felix Console (CQ 5.3)

A new versionof the Felix console allows you to grab all configuration status with just a single click (creating a zip file); just check http://$HOST/system/console/config; this is a great feature from a support perspective. Gilles, you will love it :-).

A short list of topics I want to adress for the next release, to improve the CQ experience also for system administrators, who work with our great product:

  • remove all code related to Java versions prior to 1.5 from the startup scripts; there is some cruft in there, which should be removed.
  • apply a reasonable set of additional JVM parameters offered by Java 1.5; having them in place out-of-the-box could remove some JVM-related problems and provide better information for problem resolution.

2 thoughts on “CQ 5.3: Features for sysadmins

  1. thanks for this roundup.

    will there be a possibility to run the package share on own infrastructure hence it’s not applicable to go trough proxies (based on security concerns)

    To have a inbound distribution possibility for packages would be an awesome benefit.

    cheers bastian

    1. Hi Bastian,

      I already asked this question (for the same reason as you do), but I got a negative answer. At least for the moment it isn’t planned to release package share to partners and customers to make them run package share on their own infrastructure. There will be only one package share (on Day infrastructure).

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