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This is the second Community Technology Preview of the Digital Experience Accelerator to showcase the work that has been done so far on version 2.0. DXA 2.0 is the name for the merge of DD4T and DXA, but when you look at the DXA 2.0 CTP 1 release, you might think, how is this a merge? Please read my posts about the merge and architecture of the merged product for a bit more detail on this, together with the DXA 2.0 CTP 1 release announcement. DXA 2.0 CTP 2 is the second step in the phased approach to the merge, so we can get early feedback from, and collaboration with the community.
The end result of the merge will be the DXA 2.0 release which we are still planning to deliver around the beginning of Q4 2017. Before we get there, we have a lot of work ahead and there might still be room for some decisions to be made. Since DXA remains open source, we can use your help!
What's new
SDL Digital Experience Accelerator 2.0 CTP 2 is the second Community Technology Preview for the 2.0 release. Note, do not use this for production purposes!
SDL Digital Experience Accelerator 2.0 CTP 2 contains a DXA microservice called the DXA Model Service, it can now be secured through OAuth. We have not yet implemented semantic mapping in the Model Service, so currently it is still more a Content Service (we might keep it like that for the DXA 2.0 GA release, see the feedback questions). Dynamic and on-demand navigation functionality have now been moved from teh Web application to the Model service to further decrease the number of roundtrips the web application has to make when fetching data from the Content Delivery backend.
The Model Service is meant to improve the overall performance of the product. If, for whatever reason, you do not want to switch to this new architecture, but would instead prefer to continue using the existing (now deprecated) architecture (without the Model Service), follow the upgrade instructions. If you want to install the old setup fresh in a new server environment, follow the legacy instructions.
SDL Digital Experience Accelerator 2.0 CTP 2 also contains a Custom Resolver to ensure linked Dynamic Component Presentations (DCPs) will be (re)published alongside your content. To improve the overall performance we have introduced several caching enhancements.
Feedback
The goal of this CTP 2 release is to gather feedback on the following topics:
- In case you haven't delivered feedback on the CTP 1 release, please read and respond to the CTP 1 feedback questions
- Performance of Model Service
- The Model Service in DXA 2.0 CTP 2 does not contain semantic mapping (so it is actually more a content service right now). Does that bring enough of a performance advantage?
- Is there sufficient caching in the Model Service and web application, not enough, or is it too aggressive?
- Is the Custom Resolver documented clearly enough and is its behavior obvious, or do you find it leads to unwanted results during rendering/publishing?
To give this feedback there are a few channels we can use, for starters to report issues you can use the GitHub repositories like usual, for questions about the CTP, you can ask them on https://tridion.stackexchange.com and for discussions around the merge, we can use the "meta" Tridion StackExchange site: https://tridion.meta.stackexchange.com/.
Where to find the release?
To make it clear this is a pre-release, we did not update the regular downloads of DXA 1.7, the DXA 2.0 CTP 2 release is only available through GitHub:
Documentation
The product documentation is available online in the SDL Documentation Center: https://docs.sdl.com/SDLDXA2-CTP
The documentation is like this release itself, a "work in progress" and we will update it frequently when we have more/new information or updates depending on your feedback.
Final notes
The DXA 2.0 CTP 2 release is not a Beta release, but it is also not a finished production ready release either. We have improved performance of both Java and .NET with view model caching, but it is still lacking features around backwards compatibility with DXA 1.x and DD4T 2, necessary for a smooth upgrade path.
