This long awaited release of the Digital Experience Accelerator introduces a brand new and modern architecture. It is also a very significant milestone towards fully merging DD4T and DXA to bring you the best of both worlds. It was designed from the ground up with the following fundamental goals in mind:

• be architecturally clean
• be easy to understand and explain
• achieve the highest performance possible
• provide backwards compatibility with both DD4T and older DXA versions
• be easy to upgrade

This new architecture is the culmination of one year of tight collaboration between the DD4T community and SDL's DXA development team. This release also introduces public API documentation, providing clarity for developers on what they can use and extend when implementing DXA 2.0. The key change in DXA 2.0 revolves around the introduction of the Model Service.

The new Model Service

The model service is a brand new concept introduced in DXA 2.0 to streamline and centralize requests made from the web application to the Tridion backend. This brings the following benefits:

• it improves the overall performance by reducing the number of requests done by the web application per page request
• it introduces a DD4T and DXA data compatibility layer, allowing you to mix and match DD4T and DXA delivery capabilities and content formats without the need to republish any content

Note: You may have discovered this architectural change already in the two previously released "Community Technology Previews".

What the DD4T community says

Quirijn Slings, Trivident:

"I am very glad that SDL and the community have joined forces in delivering a single solution that works for all types of implementations. It’s been a pleasure to work with SDL’s R&D team. Although there have been some fierce discussions about technical matters, they have only served to strengthen the end result. I’m looking forward to continuing the cooperation on the development of DXA 2.1, when DD4T and DXA will be fully merged."

Raimond Kempees, Radagio:

"Ever since the advent of bringing MVC into the Tridion world, many people built their own MVC foundation in order to build Tridion powered sites. This resulted in more than one code base to essentially do the same MVC thing. The DXA 2.0 release delivers a significant step to merge the code bases of both DXA and DD4T. That means we all get to work on a single framework, with the same data models and with the same agreed upon architecture. I’m excited to have witnessed great cooperation between the DD4T community and the SDL R&D teams. The common framework will result in better implementation quality and functionality, which will ultimately benefit Tridion customers and implementers in the best way possible."

DXA 2.0 is available for SDL Web 8 Cumulative Update 1, SDL Web 8.5 and SDL Web Cloud, in both Java and .NET. More details about this release are available in the online documentation.

You can download the latest DXA release from the SDL AppStore. All the sources remain open and are available on SDL GitHub.

To help you gain the maximum benefits from DXA 2.0, we will be conducting a series of three webinars to walk you through the release and explain implementation and upgrade scenarios:

• Introducing new DXA 2.0 features and concept - March 6, 2018. Register here
• Technical overview of DXA 2.0 .NET - March 7, 2018. Register here
• Technical overview of DXA 2.0 Java - March 8, 2018. Register here