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ARender 4.0.4 release

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ARender 4.0.4 is available!

 

A detailed list of changes (release note) is available at this address. We are currently overhauling the documentation for version 4, so expect it to change look & feel in the upcoming weeks!

 

Short word :

As version 4.0.3-3 was not long from now, we focused ARender 4.0.4 on the stabilisation of the previous features introduced in versions 4 of ARender. We as well reworked and reshape a lot of the backend micro service logic to improve performance, idle CPU usage, and stability.

 

Working on temporary files :

As we introduced a new (optionnal) Couchbase backend for avoiding to store documents into the filesystem with ARender, we had to reshape the file storage logic to abstract any reliance on file systems that may occur, that we have in house since ARender early years.

Shared ressources to files are now streamlined, structured into _Reactive Programming _APIs, and third party tools used for conversions (that do not follow this logic) are encapsulated into _Reactive _ConversionFactories.

This work is the early stage of the future of ARender 4, that is soon to become fully asynchronous on computing heavy operations (document conversion, document comparison, search, etc…) from the end user browser to the end micro service working on the task.

 

Couchbase and its related changes :

Couchbase can be used in ARender 4 as a replacement to local file storage of temporary documents (legacy tmp folder). If configured in the DFSMicroService (as a storage strategy) ARender will store and centralise all its documents into a CouchBase server as Key/Value Storage. We recommend this type of storage to be mostly disk based though, as the temporary storage can grow quite large before eviction occurs.

Adding a Couchbase component into your stack will help you in use cases were you find yourself having issues with the FileSystem, or that you wish to dedicate a specific machine/partition to storage, were CouchBase will be able to store all its data. As well, Couchbase will have a user/password associated to its bucket where it will store documents, and documents will then be protected behind this login system.

As a last word about Couchbase, the conversion service has moved port! The reason behind this change is the introduction of the new CouchBase storage option. Couchbase will use by default the previous port from the conversion micro service. We then decided to change the port to avoid future conflicts.

 

Again about the conversion service :

You might as well realize that the conversion service now gained a new test : Office documents will be tested automatically as well. For now, only a sample word file is tested, but expect more to come in the next releases.

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To simplify the conversion service configuration, we added into its module folder specific XML files that are read were you can put your own custom beans :

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No need to edit inside the conversion micro service jar file anymore!

 

On the topic of simplicity :

Configuration of ARender 4 rendition memory usage was so far limited to editing a YAML configuration file. Though accessible, we decided to add a specific file you can add your environnement setup into :

  • setenv.bat
  • setenv.sh

By default, those scripts contain the default memory configuration variable setup.

Depending on your operating system, pick either the SH or BAT script, and add any custom variable you need to setup before running ARender. If as an example you wish to setup ARender requirements just before it runs and not in the system itself, please do so in this script.

If you run ARender rendition as a service under Windows/Linux, do not worry, the service mode will also read your setenv files!

 

Closing word :

We invite you to test this version 4.0.4 as soon as possible and contact us if you do not know yet the download links or do not own yet ARender.