SDL Web 8 has been around for a little over a year now. Its successor (SDL Web 8.5) was recently introduced. You’d think that to an old Tridion hand like me, by now Web 8.x would be as familiar as any of the earlier (Tridion) versions. The sobering fact is that today I ran into an issue caused by a poor understanding on my side of SDL’s new microservices architecture. Fortunately it proved easy to fix.
Monthly Archives: December 2016
Going polymorph with ViewModels in DD4T Java 2.0
Plato (~423 BC – ~347 BC) was a pretty smart guy. Among his many ideas and thoughts, his Theory of Forms had an immense influence on how we perceive and solve the philosophical Problem of universals. It basically comes down to the idea that every physical object has one or more essences (or Forms) and that if that object would not have that Form, it would not be that object: a dog is Mammal, but a giraffe is also a Mammal. What makes both animals Mammals? It’s, simply put, the Idea of the Mammal.
DD4T Thymeleaf Support released
Today we released version 2.0.7 of DD4T for Java. This version includes support for the Thymeleaf view language. Thymeleaf is a fast-growing view framework for Java web applications, which can be used as an alternative for JSP. I recently blogged about it as well.
ViewModel functionality in DD4T 2.0 for Java Part III – Complex Field Types
In part II of these series on ViewModel functionality in dd4t–2-java, it was explained how to create ViewModel classes and how to implement basic field types for the mapping between Tridion fields and DD4T ViewModel properties.
This post handles the more complex field types. The reason we make a distinction between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ is mainly because the complex field types have more options to be deserialized into and need quite some help from DD4T to know what they will become.
A new approach for serving images from a broker database
A picture says more than a thousand words, right? That’s why a web site needs images. In the old days before DD4T, the approach was very simple: out of the box, Tridion would publish your images to the file system, where the web server could pick them up and serve them out to the world.
But in the era of dynamic publishing, who wants to deploy to a file system anymore? One of the advantages of DD4T (or DXA, or any other dynamic framework) is that you publish everything to one central delivery store: the broker database. It makes sense to use this approach for images (and other binary file types) as well. But how?