Alfresco Community Edition 201702 GA Release Notes

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Alfresco Community Edition 201702 GA Release Notes

aleach
Alfresco Employee
3 7 14.9K

Alfresco Community Edition 201702 GA Release

These release notes provide information for the 201702 GA release of Alfresco Community Edition.

This is the next Generally Available release of Alfresco Community Edition containing the Alfresco Content Repository 5.2 and Alfresco Share 5.2.

This release is focused on fixing bugs and polishing the product. As we near the release of our commercial products based on Alfresco 5.2, we are evaluating when we will return to new development. There is likely to be at least one more bug fix release before we launch new initiatives that will destabilize the code base. We expect that bug fix release to be in April, after which we will continue with monthly releases.

Care should be taken when upgrading from any previous version of Alfresco Community Edition. Backup your Alfresco alf_data directory and database before upgrading, and read the documentation.

Installation

The latest GA release of Alfresco Community Edition is available from the Alfresco Community Edition product page.

Download this release from Alfresco Community Edition file list 201702‌.

For download and installation instructions, refer to the Download and Install Alfresco page.

The Alfresco supplied installers will install all you need to run Alfresco on your machine; which includes JDK, Tomcat, SOLR, and LibreOffice. It also includes interfaces and extensions such as Share, the Google Docs integration, and the AOS module.

Notes:

  • JVM memory defaults to half system memory, minimum of 2GB.
  • Latest OS patches are always recommended.

Goals for this Release

Our focus while developing Alfresco Community Edition 5.2 has been to strengthen Alfresco as a content platform by building a new set of REST APIs that are used by the Alfresco Application Development Framework.  This release builds on last month's Community Edition GA release. This release contains bug fixes and library upgrades with focus on improving stability rather than adding new features.

We believe that this release is ready for the GA label because:

  • It has all of the features we expect to add in the 5.2 series of releases.
  • We have received positive feedback on the last few releases suggesting that people are successful with them.
  • Our testing team has hit their second checkpoint of thorough testing of the 5.2.0 release of Enterprise Edition, which shares most of its code with this Community Edition release.
  • There is an upgrade path from this release to an Early Access release of Alfresco Enterprise Edition 5.2.0.

Please report issues with this release in the issue tracker. You can collaborate on this release by using the discussion tools in this social community. Other feedback can be provided by emailing community@alfresco.com.

Notes on Specific Release Components

  • Solr4 is included as the default search provider in this release. Interested administrators can download and configure Alfresco Search Services which includes Solr6.
  • Records Management: We identified some incompatibilities between Records Management and the 5.2 series of Share and Repository releases, and therefore we removed the RM module from this release.  We expect to have a compatible version of the Records Management Module available at the end of February 2017.
  • Alfresco SDK: We are working on releasing a version of the Alfresco SDK that is compatible with the 5.2 series of Share and Repository releases.

Notable New Features in this Release

As a Generally Available release, the focus of this release has been on stability and not on new features.

The page dedicated to Alfresco Community Edition 5.2 lists all the features in the 5.2 line of Alfresco releases.

Branding

You will see some new branding in the product. This is a step in preparing new branding for a future release of our Enterprise products. This will affect some artifact naming, log messages, error messages and administration screens.

Content Repository

Bug fixes only.

Share

No incremental updates since last month's Alfresco Community Edition 201701 GA Release.  The notes for the previous community release are here.

Search

Bug fixes only

Mobile

We provide an Early Access release of an Alfresco Java Client SDK which contains a Java lib project to easily consume Alfresco Public REST APIs. It includes a set of APIs that allows developers to quickly build Alfresco-enabled Java & Android applications:

https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2016/11/17/alfresco-java-client-sdk 

Documentation

The documentation is currently published at docs.alfresco.com: Alfresco Community Edition

Localisation

This release includes: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese versions.

Feature Removals

No features have been removed in this release.

Contents

  • Alfresco Content Repository 5.2.f (SCM tag)
  • Solr 4.10.3 with Alfresco patches for 5.2.d
  • Alfresco Share 5.2.e (SCM tag)
  • Alfresco File Transfer Receiver 5.2.e
  • Alfresco Web Quick Start and Web Editor 5.2.d
  • Alfresco Search Services 1.0.0
  • Google Docs 3.0.3 (SCM tag)
  • AOS Module 1.1.5
  • Aikau 1.0.101.3 (SCM tag)
  • Alfresco SDK 2.2.0

3rd Party Components:

  • Java 1.8.0_111
  • Tomcat 7.0.59
  • LibreOffice 5.2.1
  • PostgreSQL 9.4.4
  • ImageMagick 6.9.1-10

 

Artifacts

  • alfresco-platform-5.2.f.war contains version 5.2.f (build r135134-b14).
  • alfresco-5.2.f.war contains version 5.2.f (build re21f2be5-b22).
  • alfresco-share-services-5.2.e.amp contains version 5.2.e.
  • share-5.2.e.war contains version 5.2.e.
  • alfresco-solr-5.2.d.war contains version 5.2.d.
  • alfresco-search-services-1.0.0.zip built.

Prerequisites for Manual Install

  • DB: MySQL 5.6 or PostgreSQL 9.4.4
  • App Server: Tomcat 7
  • Java Version: JDK 8
  • LibreOffice 5.2

Issues Addressed

This release contains all bug fixes since the Alfresco Community Edition 5.0.d release.

The issues addressed specifically in this release are available in JIRA projects for the components of this release. Please look at the previous 5.1 releases to get a complete list of issues addressed since the previous GA release (5.0.d). Note that JIRA behaves inconsistently with these queries when you are not logged in.

  • ALF: Improvements to Alfresco requested by open source collaborators. Most issues are linked to another project to get assigned to a team.
  • ACE: Improvements to Alfresco requested by product management.
  • MNT: Fixes to Alfresco requested by customers (many are private).
  • SHA: Improvements to Alfresco Share.
  • REPO: Improvements to the Alfresco Content Repository.
  • AKU: Improvements to the Aikau UI library used by Share and other interfaces.
  • RM: Changes to Records Management.
  • SEARCH: Fixes to Search and Discover

Important fixes in this GA release:

  • MNT-17113: Preview not updated after new versions, AOS and manual upload. Issue contains a patch.
  • ACE-5753: CMIS browser binding root URL is broken.
  • ACE-5748: Hibernate errors: Unusable connection proxy was constructed. (Could not be reproduced)
  • REPO-1818: alfresco-platform-distribution POM for 5.2.d / 201612 GA includes incorrect version for Share artifacts.

Known Issues

  • The Alfresco Records Management Module is known to not be compatible with Alfresco Repository 5.2 and Alfresco Share 5.2. We expect to have a compatible version of the Records Management Module available at the end of February 2017.
  • The Alfresco SDK compatible with the Alfresco 5.2 series of releases is still under development.
  • Though publicly available, the documentation is still under development. It is particularly missing information about Alfresco Search Services and Solr6.
  • The Alfresco Support Tools section of the Repository Administration Console is not yet localized.

Please refer to the Alfresco issue tracker for other known issues in this release.

7 Comments
jpotts
Professional

I am not nitpicking, but I do want to clarify. In the 201701-GA release notes there was a snippet included that said, "We expect this to be the penultimate 5.2 Community GA release that is focused on fixing bugs and polishing the product before we return to new development."

Based on these release notes it sounds like that is no longer the case. It looks like there will be at least one more GA release of 5.2 CE that will come in April.

So is that the correct interpretation and, if so, what is the reason for the additional releases?

resplin
Intermediate

That note was the result of a miscommunication between me and Andy L. I explained that it was most likely our penultimate release of Alfresco Community Edition before the release of Alfresco Enterprise Edition 5.2.0. He understood that as the penultimate release during the 5.2 release cycle. This is Andy's first time through an Alfresco Enterprise Edition release process, and he didn't realize that we usually do one or two bugfix releases after the Enterprise Edition release before moving to new development. I didn't catch the problem when I reviewed the release notes (my brain read what I expected instead of what was actually said). Sorry about that.

In the 5.0 and 5.1 release cycles, we waited to merge new development to HEAD in order to cut a GA release containing most of the work for the first Enterprise Edition service pack. This allows us to provide the most stable release possible for people to adopt while we destabilize the builds with new features. We plan to do the same for this release.

Because we are on this topic, I can share what we have been working on while the QA team has been hammering on 5.2.0:

  • We have continued building V1 REST APIs. We expect to have some additional endpoints ready for 5.2.1 and the 201704. We think it is appropriate to ship new API endpoints in a service pack because the are additive (they do not change existing behavior) and did not require fundamental changes to the underlying API framework or native services. We want to include as much as possible in this release so that people can leverage them without waiting for a future GA release.
  • We have been improving our engineering tools and processes so that we can have more confidence that new features will not cause instability. Until that work is done, we will continue marking releases with new features as Early Access.

Thanks for asking the question.

jpotts
Professional

Thanks for the clarification, Richard!

filip
Partner

Hello Richard,

SDK for Alfresco 5.2 will be still 2.x, right? Are there any news about SDK 3?

How about hot reloading in SDK? Will HotSwap or Springloaded work fine?

Br,

Filip

ohej
Established Member II

Hi Filip

SDK 2.x does not support Alfresco 5.2 out of the box, it will take some tweaking in order to get it working. 

SDK 3.0 will support previous versions from 5.0 to 5.2, and will also have support for 4.2 (however supporting 4.2 will require manually adding a dependency for Share if you have java classes)

Springloaded does not work with the SDK anymore unfortunately. We have seen too many issues that are non-trivial to fix, instead we have turned our attention towards HotSwap agent and JRebel - both of them provide a smooth hot reloading. We do realise JRebel comes with a price tag, but it does offer features like bean reloading which HotSwap Agent does not. 

SDK3 is around the corner - for real this time. We are racing to get it released ASAP, please stay tuned for updates. 

filip
Partner

Hi Ole,

Thanks for info. Great to hear that SDK3 is pretty close to be released. I will play with HotSwap a bit and raise question to SDK Git if needed.

Br,

Filip

resplin
Intermediate

If you want to know about plans for the next release of Alfresco Community Edition in 2017, you should read this discussion: