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Razuna 1.1.3 released – even more power to the open source digital asset management

by on December 26, 2008 in Digital Asset Management, Razuna

razuna-logo-400.pngIt gives us much pleasure to bring Razuna in its latest version 1.1.3 to the world. It is our part to say thank you to the growing community around our open source digital asset management and end the year with this great release.

We are very exited about Razuna 1.1.3, since it brings full support for the MySQL database, includes the final release of the underlining application server (OpenBD) and an administration for the server itself. Also, it includes most of the requests and bug fixes that our community has told us about.

Please find below a short summary of the new features and fixes of this release. For those who are already running Razuna 1.1.2 and want to upgrade to Razuna 1.1.3, should read the Upgrade documentation before doing so.

Razuna and MySQL

A lot of users have asked that we add support for the MySQL database. Thus, we are very happy to finally bring it to Razuna. It was not an easy task to do, since we run into a couple of issues with the SQL syntax itself and how MySQL differs from other databases. We already posted about our findings how MySQL is different to Oracle or H2 (in Oracle mode).

In any case, this is all technical mumbo-jumbo and all you should know is that Razuna runs now perfectly with MySQL (as it does with the embedded and the Oracle database). Support for other databases, will come in future versions and will depend on the demand of the community. You can cast your vote, or add a new feature request and bug report, at the public available Issue Tracker of Razuna.

General improvements

Overall improvements have been made to this release. To list each one, is not the purpose of this post, but rather give you a small summary. Some of the improvements are;

Updated the Flash Player to the latest version, we are now running the embedded database in server mode (thus allowing other connections to the same database), uploading and adding assets is now much faster, we moved the general DAM folder to a global position (thus allowing for greater compatibility for future updates) and finally we resized the pop-up windows to better suit users with smaller screens or lower resolutions.

General Fixes

We pride ourselves with how fast we fix any reported bug. Usually our customers receive a bug fix within 24 hours (usually within hours). For Razuna 1.1.3 we could, with the help of the community, squash some bugs. Here is a summary of some of the most important ones fixed in this release;

Users that have spaces in the executables paths would run into errors (actually, you should never have spaces in your executables paths, but Windows allows you to do so), Descriptions and Keywords sometimes failed while adding assets, Adding many assets from Scheduled Uploads failed, WMV and AVI failed to play in the Flash Player (they still don’t play in the Flash Player, but now we re-added how to play them), and finally adding ZIP archives did not extract the folder structure and added assets correctly.

Razuna and 2009

As already outlined in a previous post, we shared some of the new features of a upcoming Razuna version. In 2009 we will take digital asset management and your assets to the cloud, meaning that you will be able to leverage the Amazon S3 and/or Nirvanix data storage services. Also, we will bring review/preview and workflow to Razuna so that you and your team will have a complete review process right within Razuna. Another high demand request will come in 2009, that is you will get version control for all your assets within Razuna.

There has never been a better time to start managing your assets with Razuna, the open source digital asset management alternative!

As always you can get the latest Version directly from Razuna.com. Razuna is available in a Standalone Server download or as a WAR/EAR download to deploy on a existing J2EE server. Customers who already have Razuna deployed will get a notification within the system that a new version is available.

Razuna is a professional digital asset management/media asset management with an integrated web content management that delivers and makes management of your digital assets a simple task. Razuna is licensed under a dual-license (AGPL and commercial) and can be downloaded at http://www.razuna.org. The Wiki is available at http://wiki.sixsigns.com and the public Issues Tracker at http://issues.sixsigns.com.


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The OpenBD release wrapup

by on December 9, 2008 in CFML, Razuna

So, after 6 month of hard work (but it was always fun), the OpenBD team released Version 1.0 of OpenBD. Actually, it should have been labeled as Version 10, instead of 1.0, but the team wanted to make it clear that this is a fresh start, a new beginning, a “Yes, we can” statement to the CFML community.

For all those who always wanted a free and open source solution for their CFML deployment, there isn’t really any excuse anymore to not just download OpenBD and take it for a drive. You will see, that your code will run with almost no modification. There are a couple of very neat features built in. The OpenBD Blog has already covered this in length, so I am just pointing out the really cool ones here:

Amazon Services in CFML code
Are you working with any Amazon Services (AWS) like S3 or SimpleDB? If not, you really should, because it was never so cheap and easy to store files and/or store records in the cloud. Now, within OpenBD (and because we are “Cloud freaks”) and we like to “eat our own dog food” we made it very easy to work with S3 and SimpleDB in CFML.

For example to store a file in S3 you issue 2 lines of code like;

imgFile = FileReadBinary(‘e:\\tmp\\22.jpg’);
FileWrite(‘s3://[accesskey]@[secret]/mybucket/22.jpg’, imgFile );

That’s it, nothing else. Really cool.

MemCache
If you are in the business of scalability you will love that OpenBD supports the popular MemCache module. Scaling out to many requests and setting this up is now no $9000 business anymore and right here, right now for you to use.

Admin Console
All right, true, this is not a feature per se. Some have even argued that a CFML server without an Admin console is not even worth looking at (guys you never worked with Linux, right and then probably only in Gnome…). So for all those people and also for those that like to work with config files and don’t need a GUI for it, you will be happy to see that Matt Woodward has put in a lot of work and energy to create a Admin Console for OpenBD (It comes bundled with the OpenBD download).

I have to say that I love it. It simple works, does what you expect from it and you won’t have to restart OpenBD anymore after any changes. Matt has many more ideas for the Admin console and I have to say that I am impressed and look so much forward to the future.

More about the new tags and the rest of OpenBD features can be found at the OpenBD Wiki.

But apart from all features you know what gets me more excited with the whole OpenBD Open Source project? The incredible support that you receive from the OpenBD team (no, not me and I am not talking about or praising myself), I mean the great (and FAST support) you will get on the OpenBD public talklist. You support a bug or request to the team and mostly within hours you will get a reply form the core developers or from any member of the team. If it is really a bug, the core team will mostly fix it within 24 hours.

If you have a project or a solution and you always wanted to open source it but could not do so because your main engine (CFML that is, what else?) whas not open sourced you have no excuse anymore then to download OpenBD now and start building that next cool web application. Just as we have done with our very own open source Digital Asset Management Razuna; all build with OpenBD!

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Test the OpenBD Installer

by on September 19, 2008 in CFML

Jordan Michaels, a OpenBD Steering Committee member, is inviting everyone to test out the OpenBD installer he has made. To quote him;

Many many folks have been asking for a setup that’s very similar to how CF7/CF8/BDJX are set up in that the J2EE engine is “in the background” and Apache simply processes site CFM files. This installer is hopefully a step in that direction.

For anyone who’s interested in this, I’ve got a “alpha” version of a CentOS5/RHEL5 installer here:

http://clubwheat.viviotech.net/openbd_rhel5.sh

This installer sets up isolated instances of Sun’s JRE, OpenBD, and Tomcat, specifically for the purpose of processing CFML templates.

It is meant to be run from the command-line as the root user. So…

# sh openbd_rhel5.sh

This set up configures tomcat to make OpenBD the default processor for all CFML files regardless of their host name or what directory they originate from.

There is one caveat, you will need to update the “[OpenBD InstallDir]/tomcat/server.xml” file with a new “<Host>” entry for each web site that you have listed as an Apache VirtualHost. I am in the process of writing up some documentation that will explain this in great detail, but for now, a simple host entry with just the site URL (IE:www.mysite.com) and the directory that files are coming from is all the tomcat <Host> entry will need.

I will be writing documentation, and updating the installer to be more multi-system compatible as time allows. Please let me know your experiences, and (if you dare) feel free to offer patches!

With this setup, Jordan made it possible that there is no need for a individual “bluedragon” and “WEB-INF” directory for each web application. Be sure to join the OpenBD-Discussion group and give Jordan as much feedback as possible.

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Razuna 1.1, open source digital asset management, now available

by on August 16, 2008 in Razuna

We are very happy to announce that Version 1.1 of Razuna – our open source Digital Asset Management System with integrated Web Content Management – is now available (and this on the day that Elvis died and Madonna turns 50)!

Version 1.1 features a embedded database that lets you deploy Razuna within minutes and without any additional database setup. The embedded database performs very well and holds up in production environments as well. Of course, support for the Oracle database is still given.

We also increased the speed on some asset operations and make now extensive use of the Lucene search engine. Additionally we included a Upgrade Manager, which makes upgrading to a new version a breeze. For the CMS part we updated FCKEditor to release 2.6.3 which fixes some issues that users experienced on Firefox 3.

This release of Razuna is a major leap for us, since we have now transitioned to a complete Open Source distribution, where all components used are now open sourced. For the technically inclined Razuna leverages the following open source components; OpenBD (Lucene included), Tomcat and H2 (I am going to blog some more about this database). As always, this release comes as a WAR/EAR distribution or bundled with Tomcat as a Standalone Server.

Razuna is a professional digital asset management/media asset management with an integrated web content management that delivers and makes management of your digital assets a simple task. Razuna is licensed under a dual-license (AGPL and commercial) and can be downloaded at http://www.razuna.com. The Wiki is available at http://wiki.sixsigns.com and the public Issues Tracker at http://issues.sixsigns.com (both products proudly sponsored by Atlassian (Confluence and Jira) ).

(We are aware that our forum is down right now. We should be up and running on Monday again. Thank you for all your patience.)

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