Configuring your action to use the freemarker result type

• Freemarker views are rendered via the webwork result type freemarker, or by using the dispatcher result type in conjunction Webwork's FreemarkerServlet.

• We use the freemarker result type which is defined in xwork-community.xml, so you can simply use it like so:

<action name="test" class="package.Test">
    <result name="success" type="freemarker">
        /templates/testView.ftl
    </result> 
</action>

• Since freemarker is defined as the default result type, type="freemarker" is not necessary when declaring your action.

Property Resolution

• Your action properties are automatically resolved. FOR EXAMPLE:

${name} will result in stack.findValue("name"), which generally results in action.getName() being executed.

• A search process is used to resolve the variable, searching the following scopes in order, until a value is found:

1.) Freemarker Variables 
2.) Webwork Value Stack 
3.) Request Attributes 
4.) Session Attributes 
5.) Servlet Context Attributes

Objects in the Context

• Webwork objects added to the context

• request - the current HttpServletRequest

• response - the current HttpServletResponse

• stack - the current OgnlValueStack

• ognl - the OgnlTool instance. This class contains useful methods to execute OGNL expressions against arbitary objects

• webwork ? an instance of FreemarkerWebWorkUtil

• action - the current WebWork action

• exception - optional the Exception instance, if the view is a JSP exception or Servlet exception

• Jive objects added to the context

• JiveGlobals

• JiveConstants

• LocaleUtils

• StringUtils

• DateUtils

• SkinUtils

• Permissions

• IMSettingsUtils

• ActionUtils

• RSSActionSupport

• ViewCountManager

• CommunityUtils

• BlogUtils

• FeedUtils

• WikiUtils

• LicenseManager

• DocumentPermHelper

• MessagePermHelper

${JiveGlobals.getJiveProperty(?skin.defaultHeader?)?default(?Community Home?)}

• In addition, static models and enums can be referenced as so:

${statics('com.jivesoftware.community.action.CommunityAction').VIEW_OVERVIEW}
${enums('com.jivesoftware.community.SearchQueryCriteria$SortType').RELEVANCE.key?c}
where ) is replaced with ] and ( is replaced with [

Clearspace 1.10.1 was released today, and it includes a number of minor bug fixes and improvements. Be sure to look at the changelog if you are interested in what has changed.

Wondering what happened to 1.11?  We released a Clearspace 1.11 beta a few weeks ago, and then we decided to rename it to 1.10.1 to reflect that these are bug fixes and not releases with new features. So, 1.11 = 1.10.1.

We are going to continue putting out releases for the Clearspace 1.x series, but from this point forward they will only contain bug fixes and minor improvements. All new feature development has been moved to Clearspace 2.0, which will be available at the end of Q1 2008.

The same practices for performance testing other enterprise applications also apply when testing Clearspace. Here is a 10,000 ft overview:

(1) Build a test plan.

In it, determine the hardware/software characteristics of your test platform, which should be logically scaled down from the target production environment (if it isn't the target production environment). Similarly, plan the size of the community you are modeling, considering factors such as size of existing dataset (users, blogs, documents, messages, threads) and the number of concurrently active users you are going to simulate. Also crucial is to determine the usage model for your installation, which is typically the mixture of activities (read documents, publish documents, read messages, login, etc.) these users are going to perform, as well as the rate of activities, and the amount of delay between the activities. Finally, decide what the performance acceptability criteria are (for example, all activities must complete under 5 seconds or less). 

(2) Tune the test environment.

The target environment should be tuned to be as performant as possible. One way is to  subject the environment to a reliable amount of load, tweaking the various components so that bottlenecks are discovered and mitigated. This load should model the 'average' amount of traffic you expect from production (or some scaled down amount).

Some of the usual bottleneck suspects are the number and size of worker threads available to the webserver and application servers; database caches and connection parameters; database connection pool size; interference from outside network traffic; and others. 

Tuning the clearspace caches are of special importance in this step. Cache efficiency is the key here -- no caches should be marked inefficient during your tuning efforts. You must increase the default caches until no cache is marked inefficient; otherwise your database will be hammered, and overall performance will suffer.

(3) Subject the environment to increasing amounts of load.

Once your environment is tuned to average load, systematically subject it to larger and larger amounts of load, measuring the impacts on user experience and environment resources. Typically, the impact of increasing amounts of load would be measured against a single 'benchmark' user; the other 'load generating' users may or may not be measured.

A general rule of thumb is that if any physical server exceeds 80% utilization, or memory starts swapping, or if any of the performance acceptibility criteria (aka SLAs) fail, the system has reached saturation. By the end of the exercise, you should have a good idea of how much beyond the 'average' amount of load your environment can handle under the version of Clearspace you are running.

Some miscellaneous tips:

• Try variations of your test, and compare against the baseline. Once you get a baseline for how your environment works under one usage model, see if performance changes under different use models (i.e. try making your tests more read heavy if they are write-heavy); vary the database, to see if the type of database makes a difference; vary the clustering -- see if adding more nodes under your levels of load improves performance.

• Make sure that your load generating applications as much as possible do not artificially inflate reports of performance degradation -- some load testing tools may slow down in their ability to report accurately as loads increase. Take a distributed approach to load generation rather than a single monolithic load generator, especially for high loads.

• You should typically have the tester and target environment on the same subnet.

Happy testing!

Do you have employees or customers who working in various locations around the world?

The Translations macro can help you easily translate documents into other languages only as the need arises. It will insert several flags into the document. When you click on one of the flags, a new window will open with the translated version of the current page.

Right now, it is using Google as the translation engine, and is fixed at having English as the original language. However, the source code is available if you want to tweak it to meet your specific needs (just don't forget to contribute back any enhancements)!

If you want to take a peek at the code to see how the translations macro was constructed, you can get the source from svn.

Learn the basics of customizing your Clearspace theme in this introduction to skinning Clearspace with Matt Walker, professional services engineer (and juggler!) at Jive Software.

Or you can download the Quicktime version (Caution! ~100MB file)

You can also learn more about customizing Clearspace by visiting our documentation space!

In a future release of Clearspace we're talking about adding a personalized homepage feature, much like My.Yahoo.com or Google.com/ig, where users can add Clearspace widgets like 'Recent Content' or 'Top Members' to their homepage. A lot of the widgets that we debuted in the 'customize a community' feature (have you seen the video?) will be available for users on the homepage, but we'd like to hear from you: assuming you had a customizable homepage and you could use Clearspace like you use My.Yahoo.com or Google.com/ig, what widgets (Clearspace related or unrelated) would make your day?

As many of you have already noticed our Jive Integrated support instance on jivesoftware.com/jive has joined the developer community on our Jive Community ClearspaceX instance at http://www.jivesoftware.com/community.  Through user feedback, we re-integrated the supportand developercommunities within a single site to improve your experience.  You should now have much less trouble deciding where to post--depending on whether the question is a developer related question or a support related question all on the same instance.  For users of our old instance, all information from our old site was migrated to this new location.

With this move not only comes a better user interface and integrated user community but also provides Jive Support with the ability to create periodic blog posts.  Jive Support Engineers will be blogging on best practices we use ourselves when troubleshooting or improving our products' environments.  Please let us know if 

there is anything in particular you want to know more about!

Thanks,

Kevin Williams

Jive Support Manager