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Razuna 1.0 released

by on July 15, 2008 in Razuna

I’m happy to announce that version 1.0 of Razuna, our open source Digital Asset Management (DAM) System, is now available. Thought this is only labeled version 1.0, this release has come a long way and has been a rewrite from a former commercial application.

Razuna contains a number of features that makes it a very powerful Digital and Media Asset Management that once deployed you will find to be indispensable.  You can automate the process of adding images, videos and documents, convert videos and images to different formats on the fly and make them accessible to others with ease. The built in full text search engine does not only index PDF’s but also Powerpoint, Excel and Word documents.

One feature that we would like to draw your attention to is the tight integration of the Adobe XMP metadata standard. With it, any image that contains Metadata in the form of XMP (Photoshop, InDesign, etc. do embed metadata in XMP format) will be read by Razuna and made editable right in the web interface. Vice-versa alike, meaning if you edit the metadata within Razuna, this metadata will be written back into the image! Of course, the same applies to IPTC and EXIF metadata.

We have also integrated a complete Web Content Management (CMS). Thus you can take your assets and publish them within the same system in seconds. Times when publishing a press release with attachments was a cumbersome undertaking is a thing of the past. Simply collect the assets within Razuna and put that collection on your website. Since this is a open API we can imagine that other CMS vendors would like to take advantage of this feature as well.

We’ve prepared a brief introduction video tour , if you have 10 minutes to spare, it’s worth a watch (Tip: hover over the video and watch it in HD!):

Razuna is available under a dual-license (AGPLv3 and commercial) and is ready for deployment. It comes in two flavors, Razuna Server Bundle (built-In Tomcat) or as Razuna WAR/EAR (which you can deploy on Tomcat, JBoss and Jetty). Release 1.0 does need a Oracle Database, but we are hard at work on version 1.1 which will include support for a embedded database. Available are also a public Bug and Feature Tracker and the public documentation (which we are hard at work as well).

A public demonstration site will be soon available, also. If you would like to have a personal demonstration, I am more then happy to show you the system. The best is to use this contact form.

We hope you enjoy this release of Razuna.

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Open BlueDragon Steering Committee and my talk at Scotch on the Rocks

by on May 26, 2008 in CFML

The Open BlueDragon Steering Committee has asked me to join their ranks which I humbly accepted. If you are interested in what I have to say and would like to bring to the CFML open source community you are invited to read the interview I gave.

In that regard, I will hold a talk during the Scotch on the Rocks conference next week speaking about the “Differences between Adobe ColdFusion and Open BlueDragon, Tomcat and how to get you up and running with Open BlueDragon”.

If you are at the conference come on over and say “hello” (I am a nice guy and won’t bite).

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Performance tips for Tomcat and Open BlueDragon

by on May 20, 2008 in CFML

I get a lot of questions on this blog and a lot more per eMail on how to fine tune Tomcat and get it running together on Apache and other stuff. Since the release of Open BlueDragon, Tomcat is more apparent to a lot of CFML-Developers then ever.

I already posted an entry of how to get Tomcat running “behind” Apache and thus will focus here on the two configurations that helps the most.

Tomcat and memory

The number one issue I am seeing on the net is that a lot of users complain that Tomcat runs out of memory or pages are not being served properly. I have also seen a lot of posts where people are only posting snippets of codes but no real world examples of where to change values and how to (just read the FAQ about memory issues over at the official Tomcat site and you know what I mean). But actually it is so easy…

By default, Tomcat sets its own memory size at around 64MB which by far is not enough for web applications. You can set the “start size”, the “maximum size” and you also need to up the heap space. to find out the proper values for your platform you will need to issue the command “java -X” in the terminal. For MacOS X 10.5.2 these parameters are:

-Xms<size>  set initial Java heap size
-Xmx<size>  set maximum Java heap size
-Xss<size>   set java thread stack size

Once you know your parameters you should allocate about 80% of your available Ram to Tomcat.

Open up your “catalina.sh” file (in the Tomcat installation folder under “conf”) and add the following lines at the top of the file, but just underneath the comment section.

With the above settings I get the following Ram allocations under MacOS X.

Just about enough for any decent web application :-)

Default settings in web.xml

The web.xml is the document that defines default values for ALL Web applications loaded into each instance of Tomcat. As each application is deployed, this file is processed, followed by the “/WEB-INF/web.xml” deployment descriptor from your own applications.

By default, Tomcat sets the “reload” and the “development” parameters to “true”. The tricky thing is that these parameters can not be found anywhere as they are set by the server internally. Thus we need to ADD these two parameters and set them to “false”.

Open your web.xml file (in the Tomcat installation folder under “conf”) and add the two values to the “JSP” servlet container.

After you have done these two fundamental changes you should restart Tomcat. Watch how your applications behave and change the memory settings if needed.

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Serve CFML applications under Apache directory with Tomcat

by on May 18, 2008 in CFML

In the comment section, about using Open BlueDragon with Tomcat, one user asked: “How do I get tomcat to serve my cfm pages from under an apache virtual server directory or is that not the right way. In other words how does one set up a virtual server running on port 80 if one has never used tomcat before?” I actually wanted to answer to him directly, but then thought I make it a blog entry on its own, since others might be interested as well.

What will follow is my setup with Apache and Tomcat.

1. Have Tomcat running on port 8080 (default).
2. Deploy the openbluedragon.war file.
3. Copy over the “bluedragon” and “WEB-INF” directories to your application.
4. Edit the server.xml file to add a host, like:

<Host name=”openbd.local”>
<Context path=”" docBase=”ABSOLUTEPATHTOYOURAPPLICATION”/>
</Host>

The docBase path can be the application you have already running on your website.

5. Restart Tomcat.

Now what you have to do is to forward any requests to openbd.local from Apache to Tomcat. Tomcat then serves the pages according to the docBase path. In Apache I have it setup like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName openbd.local
ProxyPass / http://openbd.local:8080/
ProxyPassreverse / http://openbd.local:8080/
HostnameLookups Off
</VirtualHost>

This works perfectly.

The only caveat with this is that each of my applications need a “WEB-INF” and a “bluedragon” folder. Making updating a “pain”. But apparently, this is the best way to serve pages from a J2EE server. Each application has its configuration and you can only enable what you need for that particular application.

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